Sichtbarkeit entlastet Entwickler – Observability unburdens developers

Zu den wichtigsten Aufgaben von Entwicklern gehört es, Anwendungen und digitale Dienste zu bauen, zu veröffentlichen und zu warten, die für moderne Unternehmen unverzichtbar sind. Und obwohl von ihnen erwartet wird, dass sie neue Tools und Funktionen noch schneller auf den Markt bringen, sind Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) und IT-Teams auf die Hilfe ihrer Entwicklerkollegen angewiesen. Denn diese müssen sie immer häufiger dabei unterstützen, die Verfügbarkeit und Performance der Anwendungen sicherzustellen. Die Folge: Entwickler sind hauptsächlich mit dem Debuggen von Anwendungen beschäftigt, anstatt Code zu schreiben oder neue Anwendungen zu entwickeln.

Kein transparenter Einblick in die Anwendungsperformance

Um die Ursachen von Anwendungsproblemen überhaupt nachvollziehen zu können, fehlt es den Entwicklern an geeigneten Werkzeugen und Transparenz. IT-Abteilungen haben aus ihrer Sicht keinen vollständigen und einheitlichen Einblick in Anwendungen und den zugrundeliegenden IT-Stack. Die möglichen Folgen sind verheerend: Drei Viertel der Befragten (75 Prozent) befürchten, dass das Risiko von Ausfällen und Störungen bei geschäftskritischen Anwendungen steigt.

Diese Situation wirkt sich negativ auf die Arbeitsmoral der Entwickler aus. So geben 82 Prozent an, frustriert und demotiviert zu sein. 54 Prozent sind sogar geneigt, den Arbeitgeber zu wechseln.

Für Unternehmen, die heute in hohem Maße von Entwicklern und ihrer Arbeit an der Kunden- und Nutzererfahrung abhängig sind, sollte dieses Ergebnis Anlass zur Sorge sein. Der Bedarf an Fachkräften ist größer denn je, aber das Angebot an Talenten ist begrenzt. Unternehmen können es sich daher nicht leisten, ihre Entwickler zu verlieren.

„Die meisten IT-Abteilungen nutzen eine Vielzahl von Monitoring-Tools in verschiedenen Bereichen. In der komplexen und dynamischen IT-Umgebung von heute reicht das jedoch nicht aus. IT-Experten haben keinen vollständigen und einheitlichen Überblick – weder über ihre Anwendungen noch über ihren IT-Stack“, sagt Shannon McFarland, Vice President von Cisco DevNet. „Wenn etwas schief geht, ist es für sie schwierig, die Ursache zu finden. In dieser heiklen Situation versuchen die Entwickler dann, ihren Kolleginnen und Kollegen in der IT-Abteilung zu helfen und den Fehler so schnell wie möglich zu beheben – oft über mehrere Stunden hinweg.

Das Potenzial von Full-Stack Observability

76 Prozent der Entwickler geben sogar an, dass es für sie immer schwieriger wird, ihre eigentlichen Aufgaben zu erledigen, weil den SRE- und IT-Betriebsteams die nötigen Einblicke in die IT-Performance fehlen.

Glücklicherweise kennen die Entwickler die Antwort auf dieses Problem. 91 Prozent stimmen zu, dass ihre Meinung eine wichtige Rolle bei der Entscheidung spielen sollte, welche Tools und Lösungen in ihrem Unternehmen benötigt werden. Für 94 Prozent ist Full-Stack Observability eine vielversprechende Investition, die es sowohl SRE- als auch IT-Betriebsteams ermöglicht, über Cloud-native und On-Premise-Umgebungen hinweg zu verstehen, was in den Anwendungen und der zugrundeliegenden Infrastruktur vor sich geht.

78 Prozent der befragten Entwickler gehen davon aus, dass Full-Stack Observability ihr Unternehmen bereichert – auch wenn sie selbst nicht die primäre Nutzergruppe sind, sondern sich dann auf ihre eigentlichen Aufgaben konzentrieren.

Sie sind überzeugt, dass die IT-Betriebsteams dadurch Probleme wesentlich effizienter erkennen, Ursachen identifizieren und entsprechende Gegenmaßnahmen schneller einleiten können.Dies wiederum verringert den Bedarf an Kollegen aus anderen Fachbereichen – einschließlich Entwicklern -, die bei der Fehlerbehebung unterstützen müssen und sich stattdessen ihrer eigenen Arbeit widmen können.

Die Rolle der künstlichen Intelligenz

39 Prozent der Entwickler glauben außerdem, dass ihr Unternehmen (und sie selbst) neben Full-Stack Observability auch von Künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) profitieren würden.KI hilft IT-Teams dabei, große Mengen an Anwendungsdaten zu durchforsten und kritische Fehler automatisch und in Echtzeit zu erkennen und zu beheben.

Darüber hinaus sind die Entwickler bereit, neue Arbeitsmethoden in der IT-Abteilung einzuführen, die zu einer höheren Effizienz und Produktivität sowie einem optimierten Ansatz für das Application Performance Management führen. So ist die Mehrheit (57 Prozent) der Meinung, dass Entwickler- und IT-Teams enger zusammenarbeiten sollten. Shift-Left-Testing-Ansätze sowie die breite Einführung von DevOps- und DevSecOps-Prozessen zeigen, dass Unternehmen die Verfügbarkeit, Performance und Sicherheit von Anwendungen von Anfang an über den gesamten Entwicklungsprozess hinweg miteinander verknüpfen wollen.

„In einer Zeit, in der Entwickler und ihre Expertise besonders gefragt sind, müssen Unternehmen ihren Teams alle Tools an die Hand geben, die sie benötigen, um ein hohes Maß an Performance und Produktivität sowie maximale Wirkung zu erzielen“, ergänzt McFarland. „Aus diesem Grund ist Full-Stack Observability unverzichtbar geworden – ohne sie sind IT-Teams schlicht nicht in der Lage, die Digitalisierung voranzutreiben.“

Across all industries, developers are playing a critical role in building the applications and digital services that are now essential for organizations to drive competitive advantage and revenue growth. But unfortunately, many now find themselves operating under the most intense pressure.

Developers are being expected to deliver new tools and functionality at ever faster speeds; but, at the same time, they’re also facing endless demands to help operations teams manage the ongoing performance of applications – something which should not really be within their remit.

The upshot is that many developers are stuck in reactive mode, debugging applications instead of creating code and building new applications. They’re caught in a never-ending cycle of firefighting.

Unfortunately, this situation is having profound consequences at both an organizational and individual level. Organizations are becoming more vulnerable to application performance issues and less able to innovate at speed. Developers, meanwhile, are growing frustrated that they’re unable to prioritize the job they were hired to do.

Cisco conducted research amongst 500 global software developers to get their insights and, crucially, to learn how it can best support developers to maximize their impact and progress in their careers.

The research shows that developers have clear ideas about what their organizations can do to alleviate the pressure they find themselves under. When it comes to addressing the challenge of hours spent in war rooms, developers point to a need for their organizations to implement full-stack observability, to provide all technologists with unified visibility into availability, performance and security up and down the IT stack. They recognize how, with this level of insight, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and operations teams are easily able to identify, prioritize and resolve issues, without the need to constantly drag developers in to help.

Full-stack observability is viewed as a critical step in enabling developers to free themselves from endless debugging; and a catalyst for them to shift their focus onto what they’re actually paid to do – namely, writing the code and building the applications that will drive their businesses forward.

Lack of visibility means developers can’t escape war rooms

Alarmingly, the research finds that developers are, on average, currently spending 57% of their time on reactive work – such as debugging and attending war rooms – as opposed to developing new code and innovation-focused work.

Even once applications have passed into production and been launched, developers are being dragged into incident response meetings to deal with performance issues. This is largely because operations teams – whose job it is to manage applications and underlying infrastructure – don’t have the insights they need to easily detect issues and understand dependencies up and down the IT stack. To address performance issues, operations teams are having to pull in developers to understand how applications have been designed and built.

Much of the problem stems from the fact that within many IT departments, technologists are unable to generate a full and unified view into applications and the supporting stack. Organizations are deploying a multitude of monitoring tools across domains, but these tools are siloed and don’t provide IT teams with a complete picture across their IT environment.

As a result, developers are either spending large chunks of their time sitting in operational meetings that they don’t need to be in; or else they’re frantically scrambling to fix bugs and help operations teams avoid a catastrophic, revenue-impacting incident.

Understandably, the current situation is affecting morale, with 82% of developers admitting that they feel frustrated and demotivated, and 54% reporting that they are becoming more inclined to leave their job.

These findings should ring alarm bells for organizations who are now dependent on developers to create the compelling, intuitive digital experiences that are fundamental to meeting customer expectations and growing revenues. With demand for developer skills at an all-time high and a finite pool of talent, businesses should not be risking an exodus of talent simply because IT teams don’t have the tools they need to do their jobs.

How developers can get back on the front foot

Developers are more than aware that there are cutting-edge tools available which could help them overcome some of the challenges they face and, what’s more, 91% feel that they should be playing a bigger role in shaping and deciding on the solutions needed within their organization.

Above all else, developers point to full-stack observability (FSO) as a potential game changer in enabling them to escape war rooms and focus more heavily on innovation. 78% of developers believe that implementing full-stack observability within their organization would be beneficial, allowing all technologists to get real-time insights into application performance across hybrid environments, and business context on that application data so that IT teams can prioritize the most important issues.

Developers themselves may not be the primary users of full-stack observability solutions – they tend to specialize in a particular domain, such as network or Storage I/O, and rely on specific tools to monitor these areas. However, they evidently recognize the benefits of having unified visibility across the IT estate. They can see how full-stack observability makes it much easier and quicker for SREs and operations teams to identify issues, understand root causes and carry out necessary remediation.

The knock-on effect is that SREs and operations teams don’t then need to call large numbers of technologists from across domain teams into war rooms to get to the bottom of issues; they can immediately understand where an issue resides and liaise with the appropriate teams to troubleshoot.

More than a third (39%) of developers feel that their organization (and they themselves) would benefit from deploying AI to automate application issue detection and resolution. Rather than relying on manual processes, AI can enable IT teams to cut through overwhelming volumes of application data to identify the most serious issues and apply fixes in real-time.

Elsewhere, developers are ready to embrace new ways of working within the IT department to drive greater efficiency and productivity, and a more streamlined approach to managing application performance.

The majority (57%) of developers believe that there needs to be greater ongoing collaboration between developers and IT teams. This is already being seen in Shift Left Testing and widespread adoption of DevOps and DevSecOps methodologies, so that application availability, performance and security considerations are embedded into the development lifecycle from the outset.

Full-stack observability can empower developers to become strategic operators and fast track their careers

When asked about what is holding them back in their job, 76% of developers noted that it’s becoming impossible for them to do their job because SREs and IT operations teams don’t have the insights they need to manage IT performance. Developers simply can’t carry out their work effectively because they have to spend most of their time reacting to performance issues rather than writing code.

This explains why, when asked what single thing would most help them to escape war rooms and focus on innovation, 94% of developers pointed to full-stack observability. They can see how implementing full-stack observability within their organization could help to reduce friction in their everyday work and alleviate some of the pressure and stress they’re feeling.

Ultimately, developers feel that full-stack observability will empower them to operate in a more strategic way and build their profile. They can finally get the recognition they deserve for their important work and maximize their impact on the business going forward. And as a result, developers will be far more likely to remain with their employer.

In fact, the research suggests that full-stack observability could also become a powerful tool for organizations within their talent acquisition strategies. A staggering 86% of developers state that they would be more likely to take a job with a company that had implemented full-stack observability.

Conclusion – developers need full-stack observability to ease pressure and maximize their impact

Developers are intrinsic to organizations delivering the exceptional digital experiences that customers now demand, so it’s alarming that so many feel held back in their work.

The hard truth is that until organizations address the challenges explored in this research, they will become increasingly vulnerable to application performance and security issues, and this could have severe consequences – in the worst case, a loss of customers, reputation and revenue. At the same time, businesses will severely compromise their ability to innovate at speed if they’re not allowing their developers to apply their skills and demonstrate their value.

Developers acknowledge that full-stack observability has become mission-critical for their organizations. The challenge now is for them (alongside their colleagues in IT operations) to educate stakeholders about the game-changing benefits of full-stack observability and exert their influence when it comes to buying decisions for new solutions.

While they are understandably feeling frustrated, developers still feel positive about the future and excited about the opportunities that lie ahead, working with cutting-edge tools, learning new skills and collaborating across the IT department. They’re determined to deliver the accelerated innovation that their organizations need and, in doing so, to progress in their careers.

At a time when developer skills are in such high demand, organizations should be doing everything they can to ensure their developers are able to perform to their full potential and maximize their impact. And the starting point for this must be full-stack observability.