How Enterprises Are Enhancing the Digital Experience by Leveraging Observability

In the beginning, IT teams utilized Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) as tools to oversee and diagnose problems at the application and infrastructure levels. However, with the advent of contemporary development practices, the introduction of numerous distributed components made it difficult for APM and NPM solutions to offer complete visibility across the entire system.

As a result, observability emerged as the logical successor to APM and NPM, owing to its capacity to provide comprehensive visibility within a distributed IT system. Through observability, businesses can take proactive measures to resolve production-level issues.

Observability solutions aim to address three significant challenges, i.e., enhancing digital experiences, ensuring high availability and scalability, and keeping the peak performance intact. In this article, we will discuss what enhancing digital experience signifies and how organizations are enhancing digital experiences through observability.

Enhancing Digital Experience

In modern times, outstanding digital experiences have become a necessity. It has been observed that 80% of customer interactions take place on digital platforms. Furthermore, 70% of customers consider digital experience essential when evaluating a product.

Observability refers to the ability to have visibility into the complete IT ecosystem, which can assist in identifying the underlying causes of issues that affect the digital experience. Some key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure digital experience include average response time, error rate, load time, and usability.

Dubai Customs Reduced the Number of Tests by 90% And Sped up the Release Cycle by 70%

Dubai Customs relies heavily on Mirsal, a crucial application that manages the inflow and outflow of goods from the Emirates. A failure in this application can cause significant delays and long queues at the border, leading to chaos in trade. Therefore, ensuring the maximum uptime of the application is critical.

In addition, Dubai Customs aims to proactively engage with their customers to help them complete their transactions in case of any issues. However, their legacy monitoring tool could not meet these requirements.

To address these challenges, Dubai Customs adopted an end-to-end observability solution that continuously monitors Mirsal, ensuring high uptime and user experience. This solution helped Dubai Customs to identify the root cause of issues that impacted the user experience and accelerated the time-to-market and release cycle by 70%.

Furthermore, teams used a shift-left approach to eliminate bugs in pre-production, leading to the release of high-quality software. All tests were streamlined into a unified solution, reducing the number of tests required for each release from 30 to 3.

As a result, Dubai Customs can now capture the insights it needs about customer issues and track their journey to understand their pain points, leading to enhanced customer service.

TSB Bank Accelerated Digital Innovation and Enhanced Customer Experiences

TSB, the 7th largest retail bank in the UK, aimed to expand its digital footprint and promote innovation. To achieve this goal, it built a modern banking platform using AWS, IBM Cloud, and BT Cloud. However, the transition to multi-cloud architecture led to numerous distributed components, which made it challenging to obtain full-stack visibility.

As a result, TSB's teams had to spend a significant amount of time chasing reactive problems, leading to a compromise on efficiency and customer experience. To address these challenges, TSB adopted an observability solution that could track all the components and dependencies across multi-cloud, providing real-time insights into the customer experience.

Observability also enabled TSB's engineers to analyze the root cause of problems and resolve them before changes went live in the production environment. Ultimately, the adoption of observability accelerated TSB's digital transformation, enhanced employee efficiency, and improved customer experience.

Channel 7 Delivered an A-Grade Streaming Experience With 100% Uptime

Channel 7 is Australia's leading free-to-air commercial television network, renowned for its popular news, sports, and entertainment programs. The network had the right to stream and televise significant sporting events such as the AFL Grand Final, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and the 2022 Winter Olympics.

To capture the imagination of millions of people and ensure a seamless streaming experience, Channel 7 needed to guarantee higher uptime and an A-grade streaming experience. As a result, knowing scalable infrastructure and components was of paramount importance. However, its homegrown monitoring and troubleshooting tools were insufficient to cope with the scale of the mega sporting events, leading to the adoption of observability.

Now, Channel 7 can collect valuable data at the application level to understand the customer journey and identify issues that affect the user experience. It can also determine the number of users the infrastructure can handle at a particular time. Opting for observability was a significant victory for Channel 7, resulting in 100% uptime and a flawless user experience.

As a result, Channel 7 could stream an impressive 4.7 billion minutes during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, 32.6 million minutes during the AFL Grand Final, and 376 million minutes during the Winter Olympics 2022.

Swiggy Served More Than 30 Million Users and Increased Productivity by 10%

Swiggy, a popular food ordering and delivery platform in India with over 30 million customers across 500 cities, faced the challenge of delivering a comprehensive digital experience while sustaining user growth. As the business expanded, the tech stack became more complex, making it difficult to optimize operational efficiency and ensure the platform's reliability, scalability, and stability. The existing monitoring and troubleshooting tools were inadequate to provide insights into the end-user experience.

To overcome these challenges, Swiggy implemented observability. With this solution, engineers could obtain customer insights within 15 minutes, enabling them to identify and prevent outages. Observability also enabled Swiggy to pinpoint the areas of the user interface where most users land, allowing them to optimize app design and enhance the overall app experience.

Wrapping Up

Observability enhances the digital experience by speeding up the release cycle and accelerating digital innovation. It ensures high availability by decreasing processing time and MTTR and increasing customer conversions. And moreover, maintains the peak performance while increasing deployment frequency and reducing downtime and cognitive load. Do you know any organizations worthy of mentioning in this list, let me know in the comments below.