A New Era: The Evolution Toward Total Observability in IT

Traditional IT monitoring is undergoing a transformative revolution toward what is known as total observability, a concept that goes beyond simple infrastructure monitoring and renews the way organizations understand and manage their technology systems. This evolution will allow for a complete view of systems, from infrastructure to end-user experience.

This new end-to-end view, encompassing data center devices, through application backends, and even the user experience in web environments, makes it possible to quickly detect bottlenecks, slowness, and failures based on real transactions, rather than solely on availability or environmental performance metrics.

Defining Modern Observability

Observability is based on three fundamental pillars: logs, metrics, and distributed traces. Logs provide detailed records of specific events, metrics offer quantitative data on system performance, and traces allow you to follow the flow of requests across multiple services. This combination allows organizations to predict and prevent failures before they impact end users.

Unlike traditional monitoring, which focuses on predefined metrics and reactive alerts, observability makes it possible to infer the internal state of a complex system from its external outputs. This evolution is especially crucial in the current context, where distributed architectures and microservices have exponentially increased the complexity of enterprise systems.

Enterprise observability takes this transformation a step further, integrating telemetry data with business analytics to align technology initiatives with business objectives. Gartner expects that by 2026, 70% of organizations that successfully implement observability will achieve shorter decision-making latency, enabling a competitive advantage for business or IT processes.

OpenTelemetry (OTel)

The open-source OpenTelemetry (OTel) project, maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), is becoming the dominant standard for observability in modern applications. Telemetry is the technology that enables the measurement and transmission of data from remote devices to a central system for monitoring and analysis.

The OTel tool, in simple terms, helps you understand what is happening within your applications and technology systems and collects the three main types of data mentioned above, known as "the three pillars of observability" --- logs, metrics, and traces --- making it a universal translator for application data and a paradigm shift in enterprise observability.

Its accelerated adoption, supported by the industry and the open source community, positions it as the de facto standard for modern telemetry. Organizations that adopt the tool today will be better positioned to meet the observability challenges of the future, from the increasing complexity of distributed systems to the new demands of artificial intelligence.

Organizations are implementing OpenTelemetry to achieve greater alignment between IT and the business through customized metrics, analyzing the impact of technical changes on key business performance indicators, and optimizing resource usage based on actual demand.

In its study, "How Three Organizations Learned to Think Differently and Successfully Monetized Their Data," Gartner states that organizations that recognize the promise of analytics and business intelligence platforms and act to optimize them across the enterprise will find true value and recognize opportunities that were previously unobvious.

Tangible Benefits for Organizations

Adopting OpenTelemetry not only modernizes the way companies manage their IT environments but also generates concrete and measurable results. Key benefits include reduced operational costs, as it allows organizations to achieve significant reductions in operating costs through data volume optimization with intelligent sampling, the elimination of multiple agents through the use of a unified Collector, and the reduction of vendor lock-in, which increases negotiating power with suppliers.

There is also an improvement in resolution time, as organizations implementing OpenTelemetry report a reduction in MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution) of up to 80%. Additionally, they are able to proactively detect problems before they impact the end user and perform more efficient root cause analysis thanks to automatic data correlation.

In terms of scalability and flexibility, OpenTelemetry offers the ability to scale horizontally without the need for architectural changes, providing the flexibility to evolve without rewriting instrumentation and ensuring the future of operations through the use of open standards.

In a world where the speed of innovation is critical, OTel provides the technological foundation necessary to maintain agility without sacrificing reliability.

Zabbix is leading the transition to full observability; the company will introduce native integration with OpenTelemetry by the first quarter of 2026, positioning itself as a comprehensive observability platform, creating what Alexei Vladishev, founder of Zabbix, calls “a unified control panel for total visibility.”