*By Fernando Mellone
Understanding where the world is heading and looking for ways to innovate are the great challenges of public services. There is no doubt that digital transformation is completely changing the way the world's population lives, works, consumes services and interacts. At all levels (Federal, State or Municipal), the ability of public administration to respond to digitization and to create more convenient, collaborative and inclusive processes and services is crucial to sustaining citizens' trust.
In this environment, observability works like a modern GPS system capable of improving the conduct and assertiveness of the government's journey towards digitization. By intelligently managing the performance of all IT systems and operations and having the ability to automatically point out remote repairs, observability can be at the center of Governments to increase the resilience of public bodies, support decision-making, make decisions more proactive and predictive operations, as well as ensuring greater transparency in relation to digital environments and services.
International specialists are unanimous in saying that observability is fundamental to promote the evolution of the Public Power in search of efficiency. Through real-time data analysis, it is possible to identify and solve problems, improve the quality of services and promote best practices to optimize the performance of government agencies.
One of the main benefits of using the observability for the public sector, it is the promotion of a collaborative culture among managers, the systems development area, information security teams and operation teams. In addition to enabling innovation, it helps reduce costs and balance mission-critical workloads. Optimizing and automating the flow of responses and the provision of information to the population are important factors that need to be implemented to benefit access to highly demanded areas such as health, education, security, justice or infrastructure.
It is humanly impossible to monitor the operation of all Brazilian government systems. Not even a huge number of technicians, working every day of the year, would be able to do this job manually, not least because, according to the Gov.br platform, there are more than 4,000 different digital services being offered to the population by the Government. Brazil is already the second country in the world in terms of digital services, second only to South Korea. This digitization journey generates annual savings of R$ 4.6 billion and advances must continue if Brazilian public bodies are able to transmit security and reliability to the population.
The digitization of society is increasingly advancing, resulting in the availability of personal data of most citizens. With the greater use of the virtual environment for transactions and other activities, an increase in vulnerability is observed, with a greater risk of cyber incidents. Thus, guaranteeing the protection and autonomy of personal data without causing negative externalities to the economy is fundamental for a safe digital society.
With the large-scale adoption and integration of disruptive digital technologies such as 5G, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Data Lakehouse and Blockchain, observability becomes even more paramount to keeping even the most complex ecosystems running, delivering and enabling seamless interactions. Digital changes continue at a pace in governments, which are being challenged more than ever to create smart cities (Smart Cities) capable of reducing water consumption by up to 20%, problems with non-recyclable waste by 15%, time in 15% of commuting in public transport, in 30% urban violence and even in 20% responses to emergency calls.
The population's patience with slow services is running out, while the complexity of systems increases. At the same time, applications, microservice architectures, Cloud environments and new systems are more dynamic and difficult for technicians to monitor. Observability makes sense to bring together in a single intelligent platform all the management of government structures, really understanding what the alerts mean, how they should be prioritized for adjustments and how the information can be useful to increase actions.
With automation and Artificial Intelligence, it is possible to monitor the entire technological apparatus automatically and integrate different data sources in causal format with a massively parallel processing engine, including OpenSource telemetry data, to deliver responses to analytical queries with minimal latency. Analyzes in causal context support volume, velocity and variety of data at exponential scale, verifying the interdependencies of the entire technology stack full stack, baselines and behavior patterns in the most diverse environments. All noise can be automatically suppressed, isolating only the issues and vulnerabilities affecting services to trigger alerts, pinpointing the root cause precisely identified and in an almost surgical manner. With the help of technology, technical teams are able to improve the functionality and security of their digital environments, being able to focus their work on innovation and the generation of better government results.
A recent survey we conducted of CTOs around the world bears this out. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of Chief Information Officers (CIOs) believe that the explosion of data produced by Multicloud technology stacks, with a multi-cloud approach, is beyond human ability to manage. Undoubtedly, with observability it is possible to position yourself ahead of the market in these matters, modernizing ecosystems to obtain high performance in the delivery of services to the population and in decision-making.
We know that data alone will not improve people's well-being, but they can improve social and economic outcomes, even more so if used to generate useful information that helps improve the perceptions of government representatives and society as one all. In light of this, there is no doubt that the journey of observability it can positively change government structures, contributing to the creation of a better country for all.
* Fernando Mellone, Director of Dynatrace
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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