By Liran Haimovitch, CTO and Co-Founder of Rookout

IT Metrics Become Important Business Metrics

As we enter 2020, the number of software engineers across the world is crossing the 26 million mark. As Andreessen Horowitz puts it, "software is eating the world," and CIOs are no longer relegated to the back office. Today, they are tasked with leading an integral part of any business strategy and differentiation.

As IT responsibilities, budgets, and headcounts continue to grow, we will be held to a higher standard. Specifically, we'll need to start discussing monitoring differently. Metrics such as availability, response times, and error rates are going take a backseat as we put business-level metrics in the spotlight. These better measure the business impact of software services and allow you to monitor both short-term health and long-term value. Does it matter that a service is down if it is not making money? Does it matter that you are releasing often if you are not making any impact on business results? Better visibility will drive software adoption among decision-makers.

Companies such as Facebook and Netflix have long been famous for monitoring metrics such as the number of likes, number of plays, number of downloads, etc. As every company becomes a software company, it's going to have to find its own set of business-supporting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). At Rookout, we measure the amount of breakpoints developers set with our software, as well as the amount of data they collect using it. This helps us measure the interaction with our software and the value it generates.

In the year 2020, we are going to pour a lot of time and effort into learning how to do this. Defining business KPIs for software is hard, and even more so in traditional industries. We have to adjust our mindset and culture to put business-level monitoring at the base of all future software investments. In order to truly understand how well we are doing, we are going to have to adapt our processes and tools to allow us to see into the business logic of our applications and extract the data we need.

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About the Author

Liran Haimovitch, CTO and Co-Founder of Rookout, award winning cyber security practitioner and writer. Liran started to develop software at the age of 9, and his degree at the age of 14. After serving in the army as cyber researcher, developer and group manager, Liran proceeded to lead product and system architecture at CyMotive. Liran is an advocate of modern tech methodologies such as agile, lean and DevOps, specializing in Kanaban, CI/CD and compliance.