Black Friday—and really, the entire Cyber Week—is a time when you want your applications running at peak performance without completely exhausting your operations teams.

Observability solutions can help you achieve this goal, whether you’re a small team with a single product or a large team operating complex ecommerce applications. But not all observability solutions (or tools) are alike, and if you are missing just one key capability, it could cause customer satisfaction issues, slower sales and even top- and bottom-line revenue catastrophes.

The observability market is full of vendors, with different descriptions, features and support capabilities. This can make it difficult to distinguish what’s critical from what is just nice to have in your observability solution.

Here’s a handy checklist to help you find and implement the best possible observability platform to keep all your applications running merry and bright:

• Complete automation. You need automatic capture to achieve a comprehensive real-time view of your application. A full-stack tool that can automatically observe your environment will minimize mean time to detection (MTTD) and prevent potential outages.

• High-fidelity data. The most powerful use of data is the ability to contextualize. Without context, your team has no idea how big or small your problem is. Contextualizing telemetry data by visualizing the relevant information or metadata enables teams to better understand and interpret the data. This combination of accuracy and context helps teams make more informed decisions and pinpoint the root causes of issues.

• Real-time change detection. Monitoring your entire stack with a single platform (from mainframes to mobile) can contribute to your growth. How? You can now see how transactions are zipping around across the internet, keeping the wheels of your commerce well lubricated. Another advantage of real-time detection is the visibility you gain when you connect your application components with your underlying infrastructure. This is important to your IT team’s success, as they now have the visibility of your stack and services and can map them to your dependency.

• Mobile and website digital experience management. End-user, mobile, website and synthetic monitoring all enable you to improve the end-user experience. You should use an observability tool with real-user monitoring to deliver an exceptional experience for users and accommodate growth. This allows you to track real users’ interactions with your applications, while end-user monitoring captures performance data from the user’s perspective. Synthetic monitoring creates simulated user interactions to proactively identify potential issues, ensuring your applications meet user expectations and performance standards. All three capabilities combined can: provide real-time insights into server performance and website load times; capture user interactions and provide detailed insights into user behaviour; and monitor server loads and traffic distribution. This can automatically adjust load balancing configurations to distribute traffic evenly, preventing server overloads and ensuring a smooth shopping experience.

• Built-in AI and machine learning. Having AI-assisted root cause analysis in your observability platform is crucial if you want to diagnose the root causes of issues or anomalies within a system or application automatically. This capability is particularly valuable in complex and dynamic environments where manual analysis might be time consuming and less efficient.

• Visibility deep and wide. The true advantage of full stack lies in connecting your application components with the underlying infrastructure. This is critical for IT success because it grants visibility into your stack and services and maps them to dependencies.

• Ease of use. An automated and user-friendly installation procedure minimizes the complexity of deployment.

• Broad platform support. This monitors popular cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, MS Azure, IBM Cloud®) for both Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service with simplified installation.

• Continuous production profiling. Profiles code issues when they occur for various programming languages, offering visibility into code-based performance hot spots and bottlenecks.

In a market with detection gaps, 10 seconds is too long. Let this checklist guide you as you build a real-time full-stack observability solution that keeps your business running smoothly for the entire holiday season.