New Relic's 2024 Observability Forecast offers insights from professionals across various industries and geographic regions on how observability affects organizations and their decision-makers. Of the 1,700 technology professionals and decision-makers surveyed, 79 were associated with the media and entertainment industry.
In March, New Relic published the State of Observability for Media and Entertainment Report to share insights, data, and analysis into the adoption and business value of observability across the media and entertainment industry.
Here are six key takeaways from the report:
1. Media and Entertainment Companies Experience More Outages than Any Other Industry
The report revealed that high-business-impact outages affect the media and entertainment industry more than average, with 63% experiencing outages more than once a week compared to the average of 38% across all other industries surveyed. Network failures and power failures (32% each) were cited as the leading causes of unforeseen outages.
As a result, media and entertainment companies face significant financial repercussions from high-business-impact outages, with 74% of respondents sharing that outages cost them at least $1 million per hour. Moreover, the median outage cost of high-business-impact outages for media and entertainment companies was $2.2 million per hour — 16% higher than the median hourly outage cost across all industries surveyed.
2. Full-Stack Observability Led to Faster Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Respond (MTTR)
Media and entertainment companies are the slowest to detect high-business-impact outages compared to other industries, with 69% of respondents reporting that it takes at least 30 minutes. Similarly, 69% of respondents also indicated that it takes at least 30 minutes to resolve high-business-impact outages, and 33% stated that the resolution time extends to at least one hour.
However, those who deployed full-stack observability saw notable improvements in both mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) and mean-time-to-respond (MTTR). Over half of those surveyed who utilized full-stack observability (57%) reported that it takes less than 30 minutes to detect high-business-impact outages, compared to 17% who did not use full-stack observability. Additionally, the same percentage (57%) of full-stack observability users reported resolving high-business-impact outages in under 30 minutes, compared to only 14% without full-stack observability.
3. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is Driving Observability Adoption
For media and entertainment organizations, the top technology trends driving the need for observability were the adoption of AI technologies (35%), an increased focus on security, governance, risk, and compliance (39%), and the adoption of IoT technologies (33%).
In terms of how AI can support observability adoption, more than a third (35%) of respondents believe the AI-assisted generation of runbooks would improve their organization's observability practice the most, followed by AI-assisted remediation actions like rollbacks or configuration updates (33%), automatic root cause analysis (32%), and forecasting and predictive analytics (32%).
Furthermore, the media and entertainment industries adopted AI monitoring (60%) at the highest rate among all other industries, highlighting their need to rely on observability to ensure speed, uptime, and reliability.
4. Observability Provides Significant Business Benefits
Organizations that utilize full-stack observability have experienced numerous business benefits, including an increase in operational efficiency (46%), improved system uptime and reliability (39%), an elevated customer experience (37%), and enhanced developer productivity (33%).
Moreover, IT decision-makers reported that observability makes their job easier (37%), helps them achieve business key performance indicators (KPIs) (37%), drives business strategy (37%), and helps prioritize environment updates and new service rollouts (37%).
Practitioners highlighted that observability allows less guesswork when managing complex and distributed tech stacks (44%), increases productivity (39%), and increases innovation (35%).
5. Media and Entertainment Businesses are Maximizing Observability's Return on Investment (ROI)
Out of all industries surveyed, media and entertainment organizations spent the highest average amount per year on observability, investing $2.6 million — 33% higher than the average of $1.9 million across all industries.
Yet, these substantial investments in observability yielded a significant return on investment (ROI) for media and entertainment companies. Of those surveyed, 38% cited business or revenue growth. Furthermore, 90% of respondents reported the total annual value received from observability was $1 million or more, and more than half of respondents (51%) reported the total value received was $10 million or more.
When comparing annual spending to the value received, media and entertainment organizations typically achieve a 296% return on investment on average, or nearly four times their investment.
6. Observability Tooling Deployment is On the Rise
Media and entertainment organizations forecast increased adoption of observability over the next one to three years. By mid-2027, an overwhelming majority of respondents expect to have deployed network monitoring (99%), security monitoring (99%), database monitoring (99%), browser monitoring (98%), and AI monitoring (98%).
As media and entertainment organizations prioritize their observability strategies, the focus is on selecting platforms that offer comprehensive capabilities, affordability, and real-time linkage of business outcomes to telemetry data. While 56% favor a single, integrated observability platform, only 27% plan to consolidate tools within the next year to maximize the value of their observability spend — the lowest of all industries.