Federal agencies are adopting a more modern, digital-centered approach in everything they do. That’s good progress, but it’s also exposing some critical problems in the modernization journey.

In today's digital age, data is the lifeblood of modern organizations — and the US government is no exception. As agencies grapple with the ever-increasing volume and complexity of data, it is imperative to adopt a standardized approach to monitoring, analyzing, and understanding the behavior of complex IT systems. This is where OpenTelemetry, an open-source observability framework, comes into play.

Like many other industries, organisations in the public sector have been keen to make use of the flexibility offered by cloud computing, but are now observing unpredictable and rising costs. Much of which can be mitigated through careful planning and on-premise infrastructure. Government guidance now recommends switching to a strategy of the most appropriate solution for a problem, rather than a one-size-fits-all or carte blanche approach of shifting all applications to the cloud.

Tool sprawl, further compounded by the inflexibility of legacy tools, poses a major challenge for government IT teams. As agencies work to deliver the digital services their constituents demand, their digital ecosystems have grown to comprise numerous apps, systems and microservices, all specific to the individual IT components of the experience. With disparate tools and systems leading to siloed insights, higher costs, and increased complexity, it’s easy for technical debt to get out of hand.

Innovative cybersecurity measures play a crucial role in safeguarding digital assets and critical infrastructure in an increasingly interconnected world. At SolarWinds, we’re passionate about understanding evolving cyber risks and committed to the public-private partnerships needed to combat threats.

While the Biden administration aggressively pushes federal agencies to modernize their IT infrastructures, ITOps managers are left wondering how to do so without making network management more complex than it already is. Modernization necessitates the addition of more tools, which can easily lead to tool sprawl and increase technical debt. Managers are already using multitudes of vendor-specific tools to monitor different devices and applications. The last thing they want is to add more.

When it comes to federal IT modernization, technical debt presents a catch-22. CIOs, IT administrators, and developers know they must modernize their legacy infrastructures to whittle down their technical debt. However, modernization necessitates the need to purchase new solutions, which can end up adding to the technical debt load and create an even more complex IT landscape.