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Observability best practices

Beyond monitoring, proactive observability is about maturity and outcomes.

We help organizations build strong observability foundations, reduce noise and complexity, and evolve toward intelligent, outcome-driven operations—guided by a practical maturity model aligned to business value.
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The Loop1 Monitoring Maturity Model (L1M3)

Central to our observability best practices is the Loop1 Monitoring Maturity Model (L1M3), a proven framework for aligning monitoring and observability capabilities with real business outcomes. L1M3 provides a clear structure for assessing current maturity, identifying improvement opportunities, and prioritizing initiatives that deliver the greatest operational and business impact.

The model ensures that all activities—from consulting and solution architecture to implementation, optimization, and ongoing services—remain tightly aligned to your organization’s goals and desired outcomes.

How L1M3 works

Together, the L1M3 framework evaluates observability maturity across:

5 phases of maturity where you are today and how you progress
6 assessment areas the capabilities that matter most
7 technology silos the environments you need visibility across

This structure provides a clear, actionable view of the current state and a roadmap for continuous improvement.

5 phases of maturity

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AD-Hoc

RISK - high risk to the business due to a lack of tools, poor visibility, and excessive outages poor change management, ineffective audit and reactive incident response.

Fragmented

Fragmented

SILOED - Silos at their worst, failing to leverage the inherent strengths of IT teams. Fragmented tools, limited correlation, difficulty sharing, persistent security risks.

Typical-1

Typical

NOISE - Substantial investment in tools, and improved coverage, but often still siloed. Too much noise, limited resiliency, overlapping tools, excessive licensing, and operational costs. Still gaps in compliance and remediation.

Optimized

Optimized

CORRELATION - Tools deployed optimally, integrated & correlated, with shared visibility creating fully-meshed silos. Most easily achieved via SolarWinds AppStack™ and PerfStack™ as part of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability.

Insightful

Insightful

OUTCOMES - IT helps to drive business outcomes via effective analytics and business intelligence. Powered by data you can trust, facilitating improved planning for budgets, forecasts, training, and more.

6 assessments areas

Adoption & enablement

Understanding key stakeholders and business services. What tools do they use? Who has access? What do they see? How do they use it? How will we make it better?

Feature complete

Becoming feature complete. Ensuring you know what your tools can do and you are using the features you want. Tool rationalization to reduce costs by eliminating redundant tools.

Performance & availability metrics

Gathering the right data, logs, traces, and metrics to deliver both application performance and user experience, while building the foundation for robust data analytics.

Security & compliance

Configuration security for audit, remediation, and change management. Operational security, and event-based monitoring with automated response and incident management.

Automation & integration

Beginning with native correlation between tools and extending to API-based integration between tools combined with SDK-based automation to enable full scalability.

Data analytics & business outcomes

Intelligent dashboards, integrated solutions for data-driven business decisions that enable improved forecasting and business predictability.

7 technology silos

ITSM

The foundation of modern ITOM SolarWinds Service Desk, SolarWinds Web Help Desk, ServiceNow, and other 3rd party solutions

Applications

The reason IT organizations exist SAM, VPM, Pingdom, AppOptics, NTA, VNQM, NPM, QoE, Log Analyzer, SEM, SCM

Servers & Services

Legacy, cloud and hybrid foundation of application delivery NPM, SAM, AppOptics, NTA, Log Analyzer, SEM, SCM, ARM

Database

The ‘base’ of modern applications SAM, SQL Sentry, DPA, DPM, NTA, Log Analyzer, SEM, SCM

Virtualization

The ‘hosts’ of modern infrastructure NPM, SAM, VMAN, Log Analyzer, SEM

Storage

Legacy and cloud NPM, VMAN, SRM, Log Analyzer, SEM

Network

The transport and the services NPM, SAM, NVM, NTA, IPAM, UDT, Log Analyzer, SEM

Why L1M3 matters

By applying observability best practices through the L1M3 framework, organizations gain:

Clear visibility into current maturity and gaps

Prioritized, practical improvement initiatives

Alignment between tools, teams, and outcomes

A structured path toward automation, AIOps, and intelligent operations

Rather than chasing tools or trends, L1M3 ensures every step forward delivers measurable value.

Check your L1M3 maturity score

Want to gain insight into your current observability maturity level and the steps you need to take to shift the needle toward Insightful? Take our L1M3 calculator today— 21 questions, 5 minutes to complete, instant results!
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