Stop 'Optimizing IT Support' and Start Building 'Shared Observability'

Published: 09 January 2026

For decades, the primary goal of IT Operations and Support teams has been efficiency. The metrics that matter have been things like ticket volume, time to resolution, and first-contact close rate. The entire function has been optimized to be a highly efficient ticket-closing factory. While efficiency is important, this narrow focus turns IT Ops into a reactive cost center, forever scrambling to keep up with the problems that have already occurred.

In the modern era of complex, distributed, and constantly changing systems, this model is broken. When a customer-facing service degrades, the problem could be anywhere. It could be a bug in a recent code deployment, a misconfiguration in the cloud infrastructure, a failing database, or a problem with a third-party API. The traditional IT support team, armed with a ticket queue and limited visibility, is ill-equipped to solve these kinds of problems.

It’s time to reframe the mission of IT Operations. The goal should not be to “optimize IT support.” It should be to build and champion “shared observability.”

What is Shared Observability?

Observability is not just about having logs, metrics, and traces. It’s about being able to ask arbitrary questions about your system without having to know in advance what you want to ask. It’s the ability to truly understand what’s happening inside your complex systems.

“Shared observability” takes this a step further. It means that everyone involved in building and running the system—the developers who write the code, the platform engineers who build the infrastructure, and the SREs who guarantee its reliability—has access to a common, unified view of system health. It’s about breaking down the data silos that have traditionally separated these teams.

When an incident occurs, a shared observability platform allows all teams to look at the same data, in the same context.

• The developer can see how their recent code change impacted system performance and error rates.
• The platform engineer can see how the underlying infrastructure (like a Kubernetes cluster) is behaving.
• The SRE can correlate events across the entire stack to quickly pinpoint the root cause.

This is a world away from the traditional model, where the IT support team acts as a human message bus, trying to coordinate a response between teams who are all looking at their own, siloed monitoring tools.

From Reactive Firefighting to Proactive Problem Solving

When you build a culture of shared observability, you fundamentally change the role of your IT Operations team. They are no longer just ticket takers. They become the champions and curators of the observability platform that the entire organization relies on.

Their mission shifts from reactive to proactive:

• Enabling Self-Service Diagnosis: Instead of being the first and only line of defense, the IT Ops team empowers development teams with the tools and training they need to diagnose many of their own problems. When a developer can immediately see the impact of their deployment in a shared dashboard, they can often solve the problem themselves, before a single ticket is ever filed.
• Curating the Common View: The IT Ops team takes responsibility for building and maintaining the core observability platform. They ensure that all new services are properly instrumented, that the data is reliable and easy to understand, and that the platform provides a coherent, end-to-end view of system health.
• Facilitating Cross-Team Collaboration: During a major incident, the IT Ops team acts as a facilitator, bringing the right people together to look at the same data in the shared observability platform. They are no longer just routing tickets; they are coordinating a high-speed, data-driven incident response.
• Driving Proactive Improvements: By analyzing observability data, the IT Ops team can identify patterns and trends that indicate underlying weaknesses in the system. They can proactively identify services with rising error rates, or infrastructure components that are nearing their capacity, and work with the responsible teams to address these issues before they cause a customer-facing outage.

A High-Value, Strategic Enabler

This is a profound shift. It elevates the IT Operations and Support function from a reactive cost center to a high-value, strategic enabler of reliability and performance. By focusing on shared observability, they create a force multiplier effect across the entire engineering organization, enabling all teams to build and run better, more reliable software.

This aligns perfectly with the promise of modern IT Operations. It’s not just about “optimizing IT support for efficiency.” It’s about building a resilient, self-healing organization that can diagnose and solve problems before they impact your customers.

At Aqon, we specialize in helping organizations make this shift. Our IT Operations and Support service is focused on implementing the tools, processes, and culture required to build a true practice of shared observability.

Ready to move your IT Ops team from a cost center to a strategic enabler? Contact us today to learn how we can help you build a culture of shared observability.

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