Software providers need to deliver exceptional customer service. If software malfunctions on a customer’s on-premise infrastructure, on-site visibility is required to find a solution.
There are going to be issues with software from time to time, and so managing your customers’ expectations and needs is a must. It is important for all companies, but especially for software businesses to use a monitoring solution like the splunk observability cloud.
You can find problems with on-premise observability
Small differences between different production environments mean that no test can be foolproof. Errors slip through, and once they occur, only on-promise observability can deliver true replication for root-cause fixes.
Standard practice on-premise visibility uses a combination of proactive measures, including monitoring and observability tools, as well as reactive techniques, for example, debugging, on-site engineers, and replication attempts.
At present, the current approach to on-site observability is inefficient. It involves sending a customer engineer to the site, attempting to replicate, and then potentially taking data back to the lab. After this, it can be a week’s long guessing game, in which replications are attempted and logs are created in order to get to the bottom of the problem.
Security risks
One of the biggest issues with regards to the current approach to observability is the security risks that are associated with it. This is because the issue needs to be diagnosed live and cannot be collected indiscriminately for offline diagnosis. There are other limitations too, for example, removing binary data and installing new debugging software is not an option.
The security protocols of the vendor will usually mean that the engineer is not able to operate on a customer’s location with access to their program’s source code or characteristic information. The solutions are slow and tedious. The air gaps and the inability to introduce or remove code present real problems. Should you suffer due to security issues, an online reputation agency can help you to get your business back on track.
Microservices and serverless
Aside from this, the standard approach hugely increases the issues of identifying the problem using logs and replication. Logs are a worthless solution when it comes to these sorts of architectures. In fact, many would say it is impossible. This is because applications execute billions of instructions every second. Plus, you then have multiple dependencies, which means there is simply way too much information to capture. And, even if you were able to capture it, you would still find yourself with a decontextualized and disjointed mess, which your engineers are going to have to trawl through, aiming to try and comprehend the problem. That is without even mentioning reproducing it and hoping it works. It is just not feasible.
You need to make sure you always continue to improve your customer service
One thing that you always need to do is make sure you continue to improve your customer service. Answering queries quickly and rectifying problems with speed is critical. Time is of the essence when it comes to business today! Focus on keeping your customers satisfied.
