Monitoring and observability tools aren’t just essential for operations and development teams. They also deliver significant value to the business. With the right IT dashboards, organizations can gain accurate, actionable insights, leading to better cost management, greater efficiency, and even better ways to track customer satisfaction.
IT infrastructure isn’t always perfectly predictable. Systems can suddenly malfunction or even stall without warning. If your business staff can see at a glance — via a simple dashboard — that something is wrong and that the IT team is already working on a solution, it saves countless calls to the helpdesk. That alone is a good enough reason to provide your non-IT professionals with simplified IT dashboards. But it doesn’t stop there.
Making IT visible
Too often, IT is still seen a as a cost center instead of a true business enabler. What’s more, many business employees have no idea how the IT department works or how it delivers value. In truth, IT itself is partly to blame for this situation.
But what if IT were to more clearly communicate the value it adds to the business? That’s exactly what you achieve by making observability and monitoring tools accessible to your business employees — you make them more aware of the extensive services you provide them with to make their jobs easier.
Better collaboration with the business
By the same token, IT often doesn’t really know exactly what the business is doing. So what if you could use observability and monitoring tools to provide the IT department with insight into sales figures and other indicators? Then the IT department might be better able to estimate how much work is coming down the pipeline, resulting in greater efficiency.
This would help the IT department’s “salespeople” only make promises to their “customers” — the business — that IT can actually keep. So you can see how monitoring and observability aren’t just important for operations and development — having insight into each other’s figures is also important for the business and how it collaborates with IT.
Equipping the C-suite
Your executives also need insight into your IT activities. A clear dashboard helps the CIO and CTO make better, more informed decisions, for example in the area of FinOps. If your CIO and CTO know exactly what IT is doing with which cloud resources and what the costs are, it makes it easier for them to optimize the budget.
At BRYXX, our own IT dashboards not only provide an overview of cloud deployment tasks but also show the estimated cost for each task, as well as the impact on the overall budget. This alone has reduced our deployment costs by a third, simply because our teams now have sight of the figures and have become more cost-conscious as a result.
More secure IT
In addition to all this, dashboards provide directors with a precise overview of the company’s IT compliance and security performance, both of which they are personally liable for, so they need to know where there’s room for improvement.
Dashboards can even help them make better technological choices. Should we move more towards the cloud or stay on-premises? How satisfied are our customers with our IT services? Monitoring and observability tools can provide the metrics you need to arrive at the right answers to these questions — that is, of course, as long as your dashboards display the correct data in a way that the business can understand.