Background: What Is Business Observability?

Business observability provides context to customer and employee experiences so that IT can improve business outcomes

What is Business Observability?

It completes the full view of observing experiences to understand the business

This year, Stratascale introduced the Full Organizational Observability series: a how-to guide for developing a 360-degree view of customer and employee experiences.

In previous Horizon Reports we covered system observability (engineers monitoring application and infrastructure performance to understand system behavior) and user observability (designers getting insights from users of these systems).

This edition will focus on business observability, where managers monitor products from the perspectives of the business outcomes they enable.

Business observability provides the context to interpret observations from the user and system points-of-view. For example, what is the business impact of an unreliable, dysfunctional application? Or, when you spot an instance of a valuable customer behavior, how do you scale it to maximize revenue or increase efficiency?

Challenges for Business Observability

IT should integrate with the business, not just align to it

In the past, IT managed infrastructure and application components based solely on their own availability targets. Teams supporting the applications often only understood demand-driving business contexts at the level necessary for capacity planning: ramping up servers for the holiday shopping season, for example, or increasing bandwidth for additional people working from home.

Understanding the business impact of an outage can be straightforward. But grasping the impact of subtle changes—like one service slowing down—requires an advanced understanding of the whole system.

You might think a digital-based business would be simple to observe: just log every click and track every packet. That creates a mass of data, but understanding what the data says takes a lot more work.

Even organizations that achieve their service-level objectives (SLOs), stay within their error budgets, and monitor end user devices may still struggle to answer these questions:

Are our customers, employees, shareholders, and other audiences having good experiences with our technology?
How many business outcomes are being affected by poor performance of our technology?
Where can innovative technology improve our current business practices and create new business opportunities?

You should measure technology metrics such as uptime and utilization as you align to business strategy, but those metrics are not strategic by themselves.

IT leaders at the next level are measuring data and creating feedback loops according to key performance indicators (KPIs) such as customer satisfaction, quality of experience, and employee engagement. Acting on KPIs that influence business outcomes enables IT to partner with executives and product owners to drive the business forward.

Product Metrics

A bridge from general business metrics to user and technical performance metrics

Product metrics can fill the gap between high-level business goals and more detailed measures that make sense of the whole system.

Product view	What you can track	What you learn
Technical performance	Response times, defects, availability	Optimal service levels, appropriate error budgets
User engagement	Active users, session length, feature usage, onboarding time, user satisfaction	Model to predict usage, user journey map
Business measures	Customer conversion and retention rates, revenue per user	Acquisition costs, lifetime customer value, customer health score

Understanding the relationship between metrics is essential. If the product team makes a system improvement like increasing a service’s cluster capacity by 20%, does that decrease the user session length (because users finish their tasks faster) or increase it (because users are happier, staying longer to do more)? Does it reduce customer churn? Does it increase sales?

Full observability ties compute metrics to the business metrics—allowing you to calculate the total return on investment for each system upgrade.