Just over half of SREs (53%) said that the number one cloud application monitoring challenge is unified visibility across the stack. Organizations are looking toward AI and machine learning to solve these problems, but adoption of AIOps is slow.
This is according to the 2021 SRE Report that was conducted by the digital experience monitoring platform (DEM) provider Catchpoint, which analyzed the responses of almost 300 SREs in various industries.
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The value of AIOps promises to help pare through big data to quickly arrive at actionable insights, yet various components of the tech are valued differently.
While DEM solutions, as well as web analytics and IT monitoring technologies, are very important in an organization’s strategy to reduce downtime and to ensure ongoing service, users are disappointed with the self-healing and remediation capabilities, according to the report.
Catchpoint recommends breaking down AIOps solutions into their individual components and training SRE teams in AI and ML to show them the tech’s value.
Another finding from the survey was the fact that many companies don’t establish comparative baselines for SRE conditions. While toil was reduced from last year by 15% for SREs, organizations don’t know whether this was because people were doing less busy work at home or if they were doing work that was more meaningful. They also don’t know if toil will increase again as some workers return to the office.
The survey also found that companies are using a multi-provider strategy across the board which creates complexities in managing the infrastructure.
“Businesses that fail to implement Platform Operations teams will eventually hit the scalability ceiling. The rising use of multiple providers for same-service platforms (e.g., multiple cloud providers), will drive the need for SREs to develop and offer normalized capabilities even though underlying platform providers may have different interfaces and instrumentation,” the report stated. “We recommend businesses tactfully consider the assignment of SREs, or other development resources, to shared platform teams.”
SREs should look to expand the boundaries of observability so that they can become more customer-focused.
