For most healthcare organizations, complex integrations, poorly defined processes and a lack of overarching strategy are the biggest hurdles to overcome when building an observability practice. Across all industries, over half of enterprises say data management and storage (57% ) and complexity and data analysis (55%) have been a challenge in their observability deployments. System siloes can increase friction between teams, which may have different definitions of observability or uncertainty about roles and responsibilities. The many mergers and acquisitions in healthcare may add to this complexity, resulting in duplications and fragmented tools that can be difficult to integrate.

Observability platforms help organizations address these challenges by centralizing and streamlining data collection and analysis, allowing for uniform standards and more efficient use of resources. For small organizations, consolidating data in a single platform can be especially helpful. While the primary drivers for observability are cost optimization and systems reliability — especially for applications supporting patient care — these improvements also enhance clinical and operational workflows by reducing downtime and eliminating unnecessary complexity.

MONITORING SOLUTIONS: Baseline observability tools are in place in most healthcare organizations. However, their value may be limited because IT staffers must rely on multiple solutions without the centralized visibility and correlative insights that observability provides. These foundational capabilities include network monitoring, using packet tracing and other methods to evaluate the health and performance of underlying architecture; server, storage and container monitoring to ensure IT teams are aware of issues and have the necessary insights to optimize resources and performance; and database monitoring, which provides data on cache loads, transactions and query response times. Even with the right tools in place, organizations often need to make process adjustments to ensure data is consistent, usable and going to the appropriate systems.

APPLICATION PERFORMANCE: Healthcare organizations may have hundreds of applications. With so many of these being integral to patient care, organizations must know what’s happening in applications so they can address issues quickly. Application performance management solutions provide insights into application components and database involvement, ensuring teams have an end-to-end understanding of transactions. APM platforms include synthetic transaction tools that enable staffers to test application performance internally and remotely. For example, providers need to ensure that patients using smart device monitoring have reliable performance and that associated applications deliver the appropriate logs and metrics to support observability. APM or monitoring solutions may also have infrastructure mapping tools to help teams visualize the network and its interdependencies.

Expert partners can help organizations establish or improve their observability capabilities with engagements tailored to the needs of a specific environment.

ASSESSMENT AND DATA SERVICES: CDW’s Observability Assessment helps customers build a roadmap from current state to future state. The assessment includes rationalization analyses to help organizations simplify their IT environments, eliminate redundancies and optimize the tools they already have. CDW can also help customers evaluate workflows, roles and responsibilities to support observability goals and identify priority projects.

CDW’s Observability Data Services help customers tackle data, which many enterprises identify as one of their top concerns about observability. The focus is on integrating and standardizing data from observability systems, including mapping exercises and use-case definitions. It also addresses data quality and ensures proper routing of data among systems, both to achieve desired outcomes and to manage costs.

LAUNCH, UPGRADE OR MIGRATE: CDW’s Operations Platform Implementation, Integration and Modernization Service offers tailored support to help healthcare organizations begin using their observability platforms. Customers can also use this service to support upgrades and migrations to new platforms or to get help integrating observability platforms into ServiceNow and other systems. It includes health checks to ensure that tools are performing as expected, along with remediation plans that organizations can address independently or with CDW’s help.

LAB AS A SERVICE: CDW’s Lab as a Service gives healthcare organizations an opportunity to evaluate observability solutions using their own data within CDW’s laboratory environment. This lets customers assess the potential benefits of a particular tool or capability and determine whether the improvements are substantive enough to warrant an investment. For example, customers may want to see the value of AIOps, machine learning or other capabilities within the context of their own data.

PROOF OF CONCEPT: CDW helps organizations establish proof-of-concept initiatives for new observability tools within their own environments. CDW sets up the tools using a subset of systems and applications to be monitored, with the engagement designed around the customer’s specific goals and outcomes.