Key takeaways
Tooling alone is not enough — after all, you stood up the observability tooling. Dashboards are live. Alerts are firing. So why does it still feel like you’re flying blind?
Teams are drowning in noise, new tools keep appearing, and when incidents hit, observability gets blamed. The truth, however, is this isn’t a tooling problem. It’s a process integration problem.
Instead of building observability into how teams plan, ship, and operate, observability is often bolted on after the fact. This is the wrong approach. In that scenario, incidents still surprise people. Leadership expects answers but gets excuses. Assets go stale. What started as a visibility dream becomes an anti-pattern.
Instead, observability must be ingrained into IT processes. Change management, incident response, and release planning should prompt questions like:
These aren’t extras, they’re essential.
When observability is bolted on or doesn’t adapt to change, it breaks. A maintenance window without suppression floods teams with noise, eroding trust. In production, coverage drifts, services shift, dependencies change. Without a feedback loop, blind spots grow…until the next incident exposes them.
That’s when someone asks: “We spent how much on observability, and it didn’t catch this?” Let me show you what this looks like in the workplace.
In a past role, our team did everything "right." New internal portal, dashboards up, alerts tuned, workflows tested. The launch went smoothly. Confidence was high...until the day it wasn’t.
A month later, a company-wide discount required portal opt-in. Early enrollments were fine. But a surge on the final day choked a backend service. The portal froze.
Synthetic tests missed it. The workflow didn’t exist at launch. In the war room, dashboards were green. Alerts were silent. Tickets piled up. Then came the escalation, straight from the VP of HR who asked: “Why are associates the ones reporting this?”
Fair question, and a damaging answer. Here’s what the postmortem revealed: observability didn’t fail. It was never updated. The business evolved. Our coverage didn’t.
Observability can’t sit on the sidelines. It needs to be embedded into the way your organization thinks, builds, and operates. But how do you achieve that, and where do you get started?
I’ve got you covered: Below are the most common areas where observability can, and should, show up.
Change management, incident management, and problem management are foundational to how IT operates. And observability should be just as embedded. When observability is baked into overall service management, you’ll see better accountability, context, and response quality. This observability transforms dashboards and alerts into actionable insights and valuable operations.
Integration tactics:
Why it matters: These integrations reduce alert fatigue, correlate human-reported data with system metrics, and strengthen trust in the signals that observability provides.
Pro tip: Want to connect system behavior with real user impact? Ingest service desk data into your observability platform.
This service desk data (spikes in call volume, incident surges, or ticket classifications) enables earlier detection of issues, validates whether alerts are firing effectively, and strengthens business impact analysis by grounding it in human-reported signals.
Solutions like Splunk ITSI make it easy to bring this data into your observability workflows and correlate it alongside telemetry.
Make observability part of the release. New code must be shipped with the visibility to support it. Observability should follow the same rigor, speed, and automation as the rest of your CI/CD pipeline.
Integration tactics:
Why it matters: Integrating into the CI/CD pipeline prevents observability drift and ensures every service is traceable, alertable, and visible in every environment.
Design for observability up front. That’s because early observability decisions shape long-term success. Design reviews should include requirements for telemetry, tagging, and alerting readiness — all before go-live.
Integration tactics:
Why it matters: Observability-ready design avoids retrofitting and helps teams launch with clarity and insight from day one.
Do not buy blindly. Do not integrate blindly. Rapid procurement and acquisitions often lead to tool sprawl, telemetry gaps, and vendor lock-in. Build observability into both the evaluation and onboarding process to maintain visibility and scale with confidence.
Integration tactics:
Why it matters: You can reduce tool sprawl, standardize telemetry, and ensure every platform supports your observability objectives.
Don’t leave observability to the tool admins! Observability success depends on people, not just platforms. Without ownership, enablement, and ongoing engagement, even the best tooling becomes shelfware. From onboarding to performance reviews, visibility must be seen as a shared responsibility.
Integration tactics:
Why it matters: This builds a culture of observability and spreads ownership beyond the platform team.
Don’t wait for things to break in prod. Pre-production is your dress rehearsal: it’s just as complex as the real world. Pre-production testing environments, where you performance test, QA, and chaos test, are prime spots to surface risks early and validate observability coverage before code reaches customers.
Yet these environments are often under-monitored, leading to missed opportunities and last-minute surprises.
Integration tactics:
Why it matters: Proactive testing in pre-production environments reveals gaps early, improving confidence and reducing incident impact.
Pro tip: Let the observability CoE lead the charge. The Observability Center of Excellence (CoE) is your operating model for cross-functional success. Use it to:
The tooling is just the beginning. Lasting change requires aligning people and processes — that’s the difference between shelfware and strategic impact.
If you’ve made it this far, one thing should be clear: Observability can’t sit on the sidelines. Observability must be embedded into planning, building, and responding — not added later. Audit your seams. Embed observability where it influences, not just where it reacts.
Don’t wait for the next incident to expose the gap. Make observability proactive.
Explore more: Check out our Building a Winning Observability Strategy series to learn how to establish an Observability Center of Excellence and drive sustainable, scalable practices.
Ready for hands-on work? Start your free 14-day trial of Splunk Observability Cloud right now: it’s easy!
Say goodbye to blind spots, guesswork, and swivel-chair monitoring. With Splunk Observability Cloud and AI Assistant, correlate all your metrics, logs, and traces automatically and in one place.
It means embedding observability tasks and telemetry planning into standard processes like change management, release planning, architectural reviews, and training — not just layering tools on top after deployment.
Without process integration, observability coverage can drift, become outdated, or miss business-critical workflows, leading to blind spots during incidents or deployments.
Examples include aligning change templates with telemetry needs, including dashboards in CI/CD pipelines, validating observability readiness during design reviews, and ingesting ITSM data for better signal context.
By monitoring pre-prod environments with near-production fidelity, validating alerts/dashboards through test runs, and requiring observability signoff before promotion.
Start by embedding observability into one workflow (e.g., change management), establish ownership via an Observability CoE, and use observability as code (OaC) to scale consistently across teams.
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