IT teams blind to Kubernetes observability

IT teams are spending more time on manual, routine tasks, limiting their ability to accelerate innovation, a report has found. Over half of the IT leaders surveyed admitted their organisations have “observability blind spots” in terms of being able to monitor the complex multicloud and containerised environments.

The 2022 Global CIO report, based on a global survey of 1,300 CIOs and senior IT practitioners involved in infrastructure management in large enterprises with more than 1,000 employees, was conducted by Coleman Parkes and commissioned by Dynatrace.

The study reported that 79% of large organisations have a fully multicloud infrastructure, with no on-premise systems. The majority (62%) of IT chiefs surveyed said their organisations use Amazon Web Services (AWS), 47% use Microsoft Azure, while 22% use Google Cloud Platform (GCP). IBM Red Hat is used by 11% and Alibaba cloud is used by 4%.

Along with the use of multicloud deployments, IT chiefs were also concerned about the rise in complexity associated with monitoring environments that use Kubernetes.

According to Dynatrace, while Kubernetes enables organisations to scale infrastructure up or down to match demand, the constant change makes it difficult for teams to monitor and maintain infrastructure performance. The study reported that 59% of IT leaders say traditional infrastructure monitoring solutions are no longer fit for purpose in a world of cloud and Kubernetes, and they must be replaced with a platform that can provide end-to-end observability across their multicloud environments.

Dynatrace pointed out that Kubernetes environments produce large volumes of data that teams use to unlock the insights needed to optimise them. “This process is highly manual, forcing teams to spend an increasing amount of time analysing data and dashboards,” the company said.

Over half (59%) of IT leaders said infrastructure management was an increasing drain on resources as their use of cloud services increased, forcing teams to constantly switch between different solutions and dashboards to gain insights.

“Multicloud strategies have become critical to keeping up with the rapidly accelerating pace of digital transformation, but teams are struggling to manage the complexity that these environments bring”

The survey also found that for 57% of IT leaders, multiple monitoring solutions across multicloud environments were making it difficult to optimise infrastructure performance and resource consumption. In fact, 61% admitted they experience observability blind spots in their environments were becoming a greater risk to digital transformation as teams were finding themselves without an easy way to monitor their technologies end-to-end.

Commenting on the findings, Bernd Greifeneder, founder and chief technology officer at Dynatrace, said: “Multicloud strategies have become critical to keeping up with the rapidly accelerating pace of digital transformation, but teams are struggling to manage the complexity that these environments bring.”

“Dependencies are growing at an exponential pace, driven by faster deployment frequency and cloud-native architectures that bring constant change. Open source technologies complicate things by adding even more data for teams to deal with.

“Compounding the issue, each cloud service or platform has its own monitoring solution. To build a complete picture, teams are forced to manually extract insights from each solution and then piece these together with data from other dashboards. Organisations must find a way to help these teams reduce the time they spend on manual tasks and refocus on strategic work that delivers new, high-quality services for customers.”