What the Big Brother Approach to IT Monitoring and Incident Management May Be Missing

Profielfoto O.Schouws
Olaf Schouws
5 min read

We asked in a recent poll which popular TV show your IT team resembles the most. Big Brother came out on top, with almost 40% of respondents saying that their incident resolution process most resembled this show. 

Which popular TV show your IT team resembles?
Poll results: which popular TV show your IT team resembles?

Would you compare your incident management process to an episode of Big Brother? If so, it's likely that your IT environment is highly monitored, but incidents still seem to slip through the cracks. You’re not getting the big picture, and you find it difficult to relate IT problems with the changes that are causing them.

The missing piece here is a platform that unifies data from your various monitoring tools and turns them into actionable insights. We’re going to hone in on that a bit more in this post and consider how you can change your IT monitoring and incident management process for the better.

Unified Observability 

You may be monitoring IT incidents 24/7 much like the Big Brother house. However, without unified observability, the process can prove to be unactionable and reactive. This happens if your IT team doesn’t have the insights needed to find the root cause. The result is siloed alerts and labor-intensive manual processes that may get you voted out of the house. 

Relationship-based observability software provides unified insights that allow you to see how changes affect dynamic IT landscapes. You get visibility into the impact that problems have on your critical business services, so you can take action quickly and prevent costly downtime. 

End-to-End Visibility 

The draw of the Big Brother house is that the audience can see and hear everything you say. You’re essentially under a microscope. Are you managing problems in your IT environment with the same level of insight? 

Observability solutions eliminate siloes and provide you with end-to-end visibility into complex, dynamic, and hybrid architectures. This means even across complicated, distributed systems, you see what's going on. With time travel capabilities integrated into your observability platform, you can look back on all changes that occurred over time.

Deterministic Root Cause 

A relationship-based observability platform integrates all the components of your hybrid IT in one unified view. With data from your various cloud and in-house platforms visualized in one centralized location, you enable IT teams to prevent and solve problems quickly through deterministic root cause. Adding AI-driven anomaly detection tools into the process lets you pinpoint with certainty which changes relate to problems and which problems are impacting your business KPIs, enabling you to control chaos before it goes out of hand. 

Relationship-based observability software has the tools you need to see every single event and identify the root cause quickly. Every event is taken into account and connected to real-time topology, so you can not only tackle IT incidents but also prevent issues from occurring in the first place. 

Anomaly Detection 

To get to the bottom of a problem, automated root cause analysis is key. It identifies where the problem is occurring at that point in time and then determines where the problem originated. The ability to detect anomalies is a crucial aspect of root cause analysis. If your anomaly detection tool identifies a deviation in current behavior, it flags the component as a possible root cause. In the world of Big Brother, this is a big win that can prevent you from being voted out of the competition and evicted from the house. 

Be the Last One Standing with Relationship-Based Observability 

Using relationship-based observability and topology software saves you significant amounts of time and energy that would have been spent searching for the root cause. It enables you to improve application monitoring and observe anomalies in real time, so you can correct them before they impact your business. 

If your IT monitoring and incident management process is going to resemble an episode of Big Brother, you may as well come out on top and win the grand prize. StackState can help you change the way you monitor IT incidents by providing unified observability and end-to-end visibility into complex IT architectures. Sign up for a demo today and see the benefits firsthand.