By Craig Hyde, Chief Strategic Advisor, Observability, Splunk, a Cisco Company
We are in a time of rapid transformation when it comes to technology advances. As we see technology innovation implemented into the things we rely on in our daily lives, people expect the same progress when it comes to government services. When completing routine tasks, such as updating their driver’s license or enrolling in government services, they don’t want to stand in lines for hours or fill out paperwork-they want technology-enabled services to be reliable, efficient, secure and easy to use.
However, many agencies rely on complex hybrid environments that consist of data silos and disconnected tools. This can limit the user-friendliness of government services and make it more challenging for IT workers to diagnose and resolve issues. Outages caused by IT issues often lead to significant disruptions that slow operations and hinder service delivery, ultimately damaging the public trust in federal organizations.
System downtime has proven consequences on the resident experience, employee morale, and agency IT budgets. According to Splunk’s Hidden Costs of Downtime report, the average cost of downtime in the public sector is $193M-funds that could have been better spent on strengthening cybersecurity, digital resilience, or investing in employee skill development.
As government services continue to depend on seamless and reliable digital operations, federal agencies must prioritize observability to gain greater visibility across their IT environment in order to tackle these technological challenges.
What is observability?
IT Operations (ITOps) and engineering teams use observability practices to fix known and “unknown” problems quickly, improve reliability and build better digital experiences. A system is considered “observable” if the current state can be understood by looking at the information provided by its data outputs, like sensor data.
Observability provides a view of the entire organization’s data, enabling IT teams to identify issues before they become a larger problem. Centralizing data in one tool reduces the impact of unplanned downtime on resident experience and strengthens overall organizational resilience.
Agencies that have a robust observability practice can gain unified visibility across applications and infrastructure, ensuring full control over data and associated costs. This enables teams to quickly and accurately troubleshoot mission-critical systems, prioritize issues based on their impact, and prevent outages, all while streamlining workflows across teams.
Why observability is crucial for federal agencies
Federal agencies often have complex systems with various tools spread across the organization and observability provides government IT teams with complete visibility across those tools within any IT environment. This enables agencies to empower their network operations, ITOps, and engineering teams to solve complex, cascading problems faster.
For instance, Imperial College London faced challenges maintaining its security posture across its sprawling hybrid IT environment, including both on-premises and cloud resources. To tackle this, the institution deployed monitoring tools to provide a big-picture view across its systems. This solution allowed the university to monitor over 60 resources that make up its “mini-city.” This enhanced visibility eliminated blind spots, prevented disruptions, and accelerated issue resolution, ensuring smoother operations overall.
Through observability, teams can detect and investigate issues earlier and with more precision, through shared data and workflows. Identifying accurate root causes faster to ensure reliability across the tech stack improves operational efficiency. With flexible deployment methods, any government agency will benefit from observability no matter where they are on their cloud journey.
Investing in observability practices has proven significant value. On average, public sector agencies report an annual return on investment of 2x. It also enables teams of ITOps, developers, and security to build a common foundation across the organizations to better align on what tools to prioritize to maintain a full view of the system. This eliminates excessive costs from inefficiencies due to inter-team collaboration.
An example of more transparent collaboration driven by observability can be seen in the success story of the Indiana Office of Technology (IOT), which is the technology engine for over 100 state agencies. To overcome visibility gaps within its application performance, IOT implemented a comprehensive observability offering and gained improved visibility into its 74 citizen-facing applications and had access to a real-time view across its network, apps, and services. “Through observability, we’ve become a true partner with our agencies, giving them peace of mind that their critical services are performing at a high level,” said Brad Welsh, Network Architect at IOT.
Forging ahead on the observability journey
Everything, from citizen education to healthcare services, depends on seamless and reliable digital operations. To maintain this critical level of service, government agencies must adopt a robust observability strategy to enhance visibility, enable faster issue resolution, prevent outages, and improve productivity.
System downtime becomes a significant risk without observability, potentially costing agencies millions. Observability enables agencies to significantly reduce disruptions, minimize downtime, and drive operational efficiencies. This approach not only helps agencies from a technological perspective but ultimately enhances the quality of the services that citizens depend on.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Craig Hyde is Chief Strategic Advisor and Field CTO at Splunk, a Cisco company. Prior to his role at Splunk, Craig founded synthetic monitoring company Rigor, and was CEO until the company was acquired by Splunk. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
