How unified observability holds the key to data-driven innovation
By Dynatrace
As government agencies seek to digitalise their services, to better engage with their citizens, and to give them optimal user experiences, they will need to take the approach of attaining unified observability, says Mark Fettroll, Director of Solutions Engineering at Dynatrace.
As governments digitalise their services, unified observability would allow for better insights into system performance, user experiences, and overall operational efficiency. Image: Dynatrace
To leverage data in order to provide enhanced user experiences, organisations need to have a holistic view of their digital infrastructure, their applications and their services.
Government agencies need unified observability to monitor and manage complex IT environments. This involves collecting, analysing, and correlating data from various sources and layers of the technology stack in a cohesive and integrated manner.
Unified observability would allow for better insights into system performance, user experiences, and overall operational efficiency. Some of the benefits include faster issue resolution, proactive insights, optimised resource allocation, data-driven decision-making, cost reduction and enhanced user experience.
For government agencies, there are three ways that unified observability can enhance citizen experiences and optimise operations for civil servants, says Mark Fettroll, Director of Solutions Engineering at Dynatrace.
1. Improved Service Availability – ensuring that critical government services, such as online portals for tax filing, permit applications, or information access, remain available and responsive resulting in citizens encountering fewer service disruptions and downtime
2. Data Security and Privacy – in protecting citizen data where agencies monitor for security threats and vulnerabilities, protecting sensitive citizen information and maintaining trust
3. Reduced Administrative Burden – when digital systems and applications work seamlessly, civil servants can spend less time dealing with technical issues and more time focusing on their
core responsibilities
What are some of the biggest issues and blind spots when it comes to deriving and acting upon data insights?
To keep pace with the demands of the business, organisations need to think like software companies, in becoming faster and more efficient at adopting modern technologies and enabling their developers to deliver faster and higher-quality applications.
Both government agencies and businesses can face challenges delivering better citizen and user experiences when teams use different tools or build their own, as it creates data silos leading to defensiveness and finger-pointing when issues occur.
When a manual or Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach has been taken, often the most needed data is found to be missing when a critical incident occurs and these gaps or out-of-context data lead to an inability to automate.
What are some of the challenges you face in advising and supporting these organisations?
Most government agencies we work with are keen to embrace new technologies and approaches although due to budget cycles it takes time to be able to onboard. Once the budget is approved, however, we’ve found that adoption can be quite large and fast.
Another challenge we face is navigating the complexity of the support model in government agencies, often software development, project management, ongoing “Day 2” operations and similar functions are outsourced. This means that there are many parties to engage with and, while the Dynatrace platform is perfectly suited to greatly enhancing collaboration amongst all parties, getting everyone agreeable to the same approach can take time.
Finally, while this has been found to be similar to other industries, such as financial services, there can often be a large number of legacy technologies that still need to be maintained, but which are difficult for the government and vendors to support.
How is artificial intelligence integrated into Dynatrace’s observability and security solutions, and how can AIOps solutions better help agencies achieve data driven
innovation faster?
AIOps solutions ultimately aim to help organisations go faster, automate and remove time-consuming low-value tasks. Dynatrace’s AIOps is differentiated from other AIOps solutions for several reasons, primarily due to its comprehensive observability approach and advanced AI-driven capabilities.
Some key reasons include:
1. Full-Stack Observability – encompassing infrastructure, applications, and user experiences
2. Automatic Discovery and Dependency Mapping AI – automatically discovers and maps the dependencies between various components in complex environments
3. AI-Powered Problem Resolution – to detect anomalies and performance issues in real time automatically
4. Automation and Remediation – extend the platform to automatically trigger actions to resolve common issues, reducing the need for manual intervention
5. Open Ecosystem – integrating with a wide range of third-party tools and platforms, making it adaptable to different tech stacks and environments
6. Scalability – able to deploy rapidly in the largest global environments whether it's monitoring a handful of applications or a complex multi-cloud environment
To find out more about how to leverage data to enhance citizen experiences, register now for the upcoming Public Sector Day Singapore, where Tan Si Hao, Senior Solutions Engineer at Dynatrace, will be exploring the impact of data complexity and data silos, and how government agencies can deliver flawless and secure digital interactions from data.