The Secret Ingredient That Converts Metrics Into Insights

Metrics and Insight have been the obsession of every sector for decades now. Using data to drive growth has been a staple of boardroom meetings the world over. The promise of a data-driven approach has captured our imaginations.

What’s also a subject of these meetings, however, is why investment in data analysis hasn’t yielded results. Directors give the go ahead to sink thousands of dollars into observability and analytics solutions, with no returns. Yet all they see on the news and their LinkedIn feeds is competitors making millions, maybe even billions, by placing Analytics and Insight at the top of their agenda.

These directors and business leaders are confused. They have teams of data scientists and business analysts working with the most cutting edge tools on the market. Have those end of year figures moved though? Has performance improved more than a hard fought one, maybe two percent?

All metrics, no insights

The problem lies in those two words- Metrics and Insight.

More specifically, the problem is that most businesses love to dive into the metrics part. What they don’t realize is that without the ‘Insight’ half of the equation, all data analysis provides is endless logs of numbers and graphs. In a word, noise.

Sound familiar? Pumping your time, energy, and finance into the metrics part of your process will yield diminishing returns very quickly if that’s all you’re doing. If you want to dig yourself out of the ‘we just need more data’ trap, maybe you should switch your focus to the insights?

Data alone won’t solve this problem. To gain insight, what you need is something new. Context.

Why you NEED context

Metrics and Insight is business slang for keeping an extra close eye on things. Whether you’re using that log stack for financial data or monitoring a system or network, the fundamentals are the same. The How can be incredibly complex, but the What is straight forward. You’re using tech as a microscope for a hyper-focused view.

Without proper context it is impossible to gain any insight. Be it a warning about continued RAM spikes from your system monitoring log, or your e-commerce dashboard flagging a drop in sales of your flagship product, nothing actionable can be salvaged from the data alone.

If your metrics tell you that your CPU is spiking, you remain entirely unaware of why this is happening or what is going on. When you combine that spike in CPU with application logs indicating thread locking due to database timeouts, you suddenly have context. CPU spikes are good for getting you out of bed, but your logs are where you will find why you’re out of bed.

But how do you get context?

Context – Creating insight from metrics

With platforms like Coralogix, the endless sea of data noise can be condensed and transformed into understandable results, recommendations, and solutions. With a single platform, the results of your Analysis & Insight investments can yield nothing but actionable observations. Through collecting logs based on predetermined criteria, and delivering messages and alerts for the changes that impact your goals, Coralogix makes every minute you spend with your data cost effective. The platform provides context.

Platforms like Coralogix create context from the noise, filtering out what’s relevant to provide you with a clear picture of your data landscape. From context comes clarity, and from clarity comes insight, strategy, and growth.