Top 10 SMB Tech Issues: Observability
23 June 2025
Issue 2: Let’s talk about observability. Or more accurately: the lack of it.
The problem
Too many businesses find out there’s a problem when a customer tells them. The website’s down. The VPN’s slow. A key process has stopped working.
Why? Because most monitoring setups are basic, outdated, or noisy — and in some cases, non-existent.
- Ping checks and “is it up?” style dashboards
- 10,000 alerts that all say the same thing
- No visibility of cloud-native infrastructure or SaaS apps
- No ownership of what’s being monitored or why
Why it matters
If you can’t see what’s happening in your systems, you can’t run them properly. You’re reactive, not proactive. And you’re always behind the problem.
Bad observability also leads to finger-pointing — is it the app? The network? The vendor? The cloud? Without context, you’re guessing.
What good observability looks like
- You know what “normal” looks like for your systems
- You have the right metrics and logs in one place
- You get meaningful alerts — not noise
- You can trace problems from symptom to source
And importantly, your monitoring reflects how your services actually work — not just a bunch of hostnames and port checks.
What to do next
You don’t need a platform overhaul to get started. Try this:
- Pick one system — maybe your website or core application
- Map out what matters: availability, response time, error rate, logs
- Clean up your alerts: are they actionable? Are they duplicated?
- Introduce a weekly review of monitoring data — not just when things break
Small improvements here go a long way. You can’t fix what you can’t see.
If your team’s drowning in alerts or blind to what’s really going on, I can help sort it. Let’s have a chat.