Massive IT Infrastructure Means Too Many Places to Look
While technology teams have never had more information available to them, the challenge is the information often exists in separate places.
Matthew Leger, senior research manager for IDC worldwide education digital strategies, says the biggest visibility gaps tend to emerge where traffic moves between environments.
Districts can generally monitor activity on their own networks and servers, but visibility often diminishes once users move into cloud platforms or SaaS applications. At the same time, many districts manage tens of thousands of devices across multiple campuses.
As a result, IT teams frequently discover problems only after teachers and staff begin reporting them.
“IT teams typically learn about problems only after a wave of help desk tickets arrives,” Leger says.
Scott Ragsdale, vice president of sales for healthcare, state and local, and education at Nutanix, says the problem is often not a lack of monitoring tools but a lack of visibility across systems.
“When a teacher says a platform is frozen, IT ends up chasing the issue across Wi-Fi, infrastructure and cloud providers, instead of seeing the problem end to end,” he says.
Connecting the Dots Between Monitoring and Observability
Traditional monitoring tools are designed to identify known problems. Observability is designed to help answer questions that were never anticipated.
Leger says monitoring relies on predefined thresholds and alerts. Observability combines metrics, logs and traces from across the environment, allowing technology teams to investigate unexpected issues and understand how events in one system affect another.
That distinction matters in hybrid environments, where a performance problem might involve a network path, a cloud workload, an application configuration issue or all three simultaneously.
“Traditional monitoring tells you when something is broken,” Ragsdale explains. “Observability tells you why.”
Vikram Murali, vice president for observability development at IBM, says observability brings together information from infrastructure, applications, networks and user activity into a single operational picture.
“The biggest gap is understanding how all of these components interact with each other,” he says. “A modern observability tool perspective connects all of these siloed areas.”
Seeing What Students See
For district leaders, infrastructure metrics matter only if they affect teaching and learning.
Leger says latency and packet loss often have the greatest instructional impact because applications such as videoconferencing platforms and online assessments are particularly sensitive to network performance.
Throughput becomes especially important during testing windows and other high-demand periods. Rising error rates can also provide advance warning before a service interruption becomes visible to users.
