Addressing public sector IT complexity with observability

Two years ago, the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) launched its 2022-2025 roadmap for digital and data: Transforming for a Digital Future. The roadmap was created with the intention of outlining a clear set of priorities for the public sector, “with an ambition to transform public services, deliver world-class technology, and attract and retain the best digital talent”. This roadmap was to act as a guide to the way in which government organisations can realistically approach achieving a digital future.

Since the release of this report, significant progress has been made – take the GOV.UK One Login initiative where over 2.2 million users have now proven their identity through digital applications, while the government has also recruited heavily in the civil service Government Digital and Data profession.

And more recently, we’ve seen rapid technological advances – most notably in the area of generative artificial intelligence (AI) – presenting the government with new challenges to address but also greater opportunities for innovation and transformation. Last year, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he wanted the UK to become an ‘AI superpower’ and the UK is leading in AI investment across Europe.

But is the government trying to run before it can walk?

Operational efficiency should be front of mind

It’s important to ensure the basics are being met operationally, first and foremost. Previous digital transformation efforts have contributed to the government’s currently complex operational efforts. According to the report, in order to reach the 2025 roadmap goal it has set itself, the government must deliver against six cross-government criteria. One of these being to own efficient, secure, and sustainable technology.

Therefore, in this environment of unpredictable changes, the government needs to streamline its IT operations and prioritise end-to-end visibility across the IT stack. One long-term solution is observability, which provides centralised insights, automated analytics, and actional intelligence across on-premises and multi-cloud environments.

Here are a few ways observability goes beyond traditional monitoring, and some of the capabilities that can help government IT leaders efficiently manage hybrid IT complexity:

1.    Reducing tool sprawl with centralised visibility

Traditionally, government organisations adopted a diverse set of best-of-breed products to monitor and manage different parts of their technology stacks. However, over time this approach has led to tool sprawl and escalating costs. Disparate monitoring tools also often result in information silos, conflicting data, and alert fatigue—all of which make it more difficult to pinpoint and resolve IT issues or outages.

Observability provides end-to-end oversight of service delivery and component dependencies across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. Through a single pane of glass, teams can receive health scores and insights across networks, applications, databases, and systems. This fully integrated view enables IT teams to identify and diagnose service issues and determine root causes more efficiently.

Having a single source of truth for the entire IT environment also eliminates the need for other piecemeal monitoring and IT management tools, helping reduce tool sprawl and optimise IT spend.

2.    Gain foresight with AIOps

Observability solutions can apply cross-domain correlation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) to analyse data from across the entire IT environment, resulting in deep but digestible insights into network operations. With this intelligent view of an organisation’s sprawling infrastructure, government IT administrators can reduce alert noise and accelerate issue remediation.

AIOps-powered observability also allows administrators to anticipate network issues, detect anomalies, and proactively address issues before they impact availability, the employee experience, and day-to-day operations. Machine learning technology also means the solution will continually learn and improve its intelligent alerting capabilities over time.

3. Carefully modernising legacy systems

The roadmap from the CDDO appropriately prioritises decommissioning and migrating ‘high risk’ legacy systems. However, legacy IT systems deemed lower risk will likely remain in place for some time, meaning IT admins will still need to manage complex hybrid environments.

When finding an observability solution, it is important to find a solution that works for you. It should be able to onboard new services, applications, and infrastructure with ease while maintaining visibility into older systems and apps that are still in use by many government agencies.

It is also important to note that it does take constant maintenance to ensure good observability. The more services you install, the more you’ll need to assess your instrumentation. If not, you can inadvertently leave gaps in your traces and logs where requests could disappear into.

Teams should aim to place observability at the core of their IT strategy – especially for complex system structures where functionality is dispersed among several microservices.

By leveraging an observability solution that can be self-hosted or in the cloud, government agencies can select the deployment option that works for them, now and in the future. With end-to-end visibility, IT teams can properly oversee their entire house of IT infrastructure, monitoring tools and increase productivity with AIOps.