The Challenges of Observability and Why Linking Silos Matters

In today’s complex digital landscape, observability has become essential for understanding, optimizing, and troubleshooting modern systems. Observability goes beyond traditional monitoring; it provides a comprehensive view into how and why systems are functioning—or failing. But as necessary as it is, achieving effective observability remains a significant challenge for many organizations.

Understanding Observability

Observability is the ability to measure a system's current state based on the data it generates, particularly in response to internal or external events. Core pillars of observability include metrics, logs, and traces. Together, they provide insights into how applications perform and interact within the infrastructure.

Observability is invaluable for incident response, capacity planning, and root cause analysis, but getting it right involves more than deploying the right tools. One of the biggest hurdles is in overcoming fragmented views of the data generated by various systems and services.

The Silo Challenge in Observability

Observability often meets obstacles because different teams control different parts of the stack: developers, network engineers, DevOps, and support teams. Each team generates and monitors its own data, often using specialized tools, resulting in “silos” of information. This fragmentation makes it difficult to correlate data across the system, and critical insights may be missed due to lack of shared visibility.

A common recommendation for achieving successful observability is to "break down silos"—to dismantle these separate domains. But this approach can be difficult, if not impractical, as it often requires organizational overhauls, changes in team structure, and realignment of goals. These efforts are time-consuming, disruptive, and may not guarantee the desired level of integrated visibility.

Linking Silos Instead of Breaking Them Down

Rather than breaking down silos entirely, a more pragmatic approach may be to link them together, creating a unified view of the system across teams. Linking silos allows each team to retain its focus and tools while also providing a means to correlate and share insights. This can be achieved through a few key strategies:

1. Data Integration Layer: Implement a centralized data integration layer where logs, metrics, and traces from various tools and services are aggregated. This creates a “single source of truth” without requiring teams to give up their specialized monitoring setups.
2. Cross-Team Dashboards: Develop dashboards that pull relevant data from multiple sources. These dashboards provide high-level insights for executives while offering drill-down capabilities for engineers. This fosters a collaborative environment without enforcing tool conformity across teams.
3. Unified Alerts and Incident Response: Ensure that alerts and incident response protocols work across silos by establishing shared alerting thresholds and clear communication channels. Linked, shared incident management helps prevent duplication of work and facilitates faster, more coordinated responses.
4. APIs and Shared Standards: Use APIs and shared data standards to facilitate data flow between tools and services. For example, OpenTelemetry provides a vendor-neutral standard for collecting telemetry data across different environments and stacks, making it easier to link data without requiring changes to every tool.

Benefits of Linking Silos

By linking silos instead of breaking them, organizations can achieve observability without losing the flexibility of individual teams. This approach also:

• Reduces Complexity: Teams continue using the tools they are comfortable with, reducing the learning curve and easing adoption.
• Preserves Specialization: Each team can focus on its domain, benefiting from the depth of specialized knowledge while still contributing to a broader view.
• Promotes Cross-Team Collaboration: Linked silos foster collaboration without forcing organizational restructuring or tool conformity.

Final Thoughts

Observability is crucial for optimizing and troubleshooting today’s systems, but achieving it isn’t a matter of deploying tools alone. Breaking down silos is often impractical, disruptive, and challenging to implement. Linking silos, on the other hand, offers a balanced approach that retains the strengths of each team while enabling the broad, correlated view necessary for effective observability. By focusing on data integration, cross-team visibility, and shared standards, organizations can build an observability framework that’s both robust and adaptable.