The size and distributed nature of the data, the speed of action and the continuous intelligence bring out new business needs
By Elena Fasolo, Senior Manager – IT Data Analytics of Kirey Group and Claudio De Rossi, Business Development Manager
An increasing infrastructural and applicative complexity characterizes the digital scenario, in which the interactions between the different layers and systems, parts of increasingly distributed environments, increase exponentially, before the need to offer increasingly complex services quickly and safely, even if born with the aim of simplifying the work of users.
In this scenario, the size and distributed nature of the data, the speed of action and the continuous intelligence required by the digital business mean that the proliferation of rigid instruments risks slowing down the development of the business. In fact, companies now have many, sometimes too many, heterogeneous tools that are incapable of communicating with each other, standard analysis algorithms that do not help them to put the many data in common to enable their higher level understanding. All this while the famous “dark data”, coming from network devices, system registers, but also from e-mail or other unstructured sources accumulate in the intermediate layers of the operating systems of each company, often without it having any a real awareness.
Global visibility of the service and timely intervention
An infrastructure composed of several layers therefore represents an extremely demanding challenge from the point of view of understanding, where monitoring must be able to integrate data semantically distant, but logically correlated, and really understand where the critical issues are in real time.
It is essential to keep in mind that each organization differs from the other, by virtue of its objectives, business needs and the scenario in which it operates. For this reason, in a project aimed at obtaining total visibility on a company’s data and processes, observability is not limited to simple monitoring, but supports a deep knowledge of the reality in which it is operating, with a consulting approach and personalized, because there is no project of data governance equal to the other.
An excellent starting point is represented by Elasticsearch, a highly customizable open platform, able to integrate with existing solutions in the company and which, together with an understanding of the specific needs of the customer, allows it to be supported in achieving concrete objectives from the point of view understanding, timeliness of intervention in the field of cyber defense and the ability to improve the quality of services and the user experience offered.
Elasticsearch is a precious piece from the point of view of the ability to obtain a “total visibility”, because it allows to collect, analyze, correlate and present large amounts of heterogeneous data including application logs, process KPIs, business workflows and other data useful for the purpose, such as for example the browsers used by users, the times of work sessions and more. The underlying architecture is obviously invisible to the user, who perceives everything as a single entity, although the distributed nature of the stack causes the processes to be interconnected.
The role of observability in a concrete project
To better understand what observability entails, I would like to mention a project recently completed by Kirey, part of a vast initiative launched by an insurance company to improve the customer experience.
The Company provided its agencies, distributed throughout the national territory, with a series of software tools for managing the daily operations of the policies, the practices, the customer master data. When the agencies received reports of “slowdowns”, “errors” or other problems, the parent company had no tools available to perform a quick and timely investigation into the cause of the problem. In fact, commercial application monitoring systems provided information limited to the monitored stack, without offering any correlation with the other indicators useful for analysis.
The analysis carried out on the customer’s processes made it possible to identify a series of indicators and KPIs that were able to monitor a series of parameters useful for analyzing the performance of business processes in their entirety and the ways in which end users interact with these processes. By adopting Elasticsearch and taking advantage of the stack’s ability to perform and Kirey’s expertise in monitoring and IT data analytics, we have provided the company with a tool that can monitor the status of business processes and a series of information in real time.
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