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Advanced Observability Teams See Big Efficiency Gains - Part 1

George Miranda
Honeycomb.io

As our production application systems continuously increase in complexity, the challenges of understanding, debugging, and improving them keep growing by orders of magnitude. The practice of Observability addresses both the social and the technological challenges of wrangling complexity and working toward achieving production excellence. New research shows how observable systems and practices are changing the application performance management (APM) landscape.

Observability Requires Both Technical and Social Approaches

Tooling alone can't solve anything, it's just a necessary part of any solution. Tackling the challenges of managing complex production systems isn't just a technical problem and it isn't just a social problem. We manage sociotechnical systems and any reasonable solution must take that into account in order to be effective.

Observability isn't logs, metrics, and tracing. Yes, those aspects are important. Those tools can help shed light on what's happening in the systems that are critical to your business. However, there's a big difference between having tools that provide instrumentation and using them to achieve better outcomes. Many of today's tools require you to predict the future by knowing in advance what conditions to monitor, which trends to look for, or the correlations you need to make to find application performance hotspots.

The coveted observability sweet spot is finding the unknown unknowns. Observability is a sociotechnical practice that allows you to answer any arbitrary questions about your environment, without needing to know ahead of time what you wanted to ask. However, it's doing the work that proves a bit more challenging for many teams, especially those weaning off legacy tools.

Practicing observability is a journey. It takes time for entire teams to adopt new practices and shift mindsets to a model of shared ownership. Our new study shows how different teams are practicing, or intending to practice, observability within the next two years. The report also examines the challenges teams face and the practices they are implementing as they progress on their observability journey.

Observability Maturity Research Findings

Teams must decide how to start their observability journey. Those early decisions have a high degree of impact because they influence both tool choices and habits during the software development and delivery lifecycle. Teams that adopt recommended observability practise to an advanced degree see greater benefits than less advanced teams. Advanced teams stabilize their systems, spend less time reactively fixing issues in production/refactoring code/resolving technical debt, and spend more time proactively innovating. 

The report affirms that adopting observability tools, site reliability engineering (SRE) practices, and a culture of shared ownership translates to efficiencies across the software engineering cycle, better end-user experiences, and ultimately helps teams achieve production excellence.

Outcomes are much more pronounced when teams apply observability mindsets and processes in conjunction with tooling. That combination can lead to a virtuous cycle of reinforcement, presuming those teams are using tools purposely designed to address observability use-cases. Research findings show that most teams adopt a handful of tools across disparate teams to accomplish daily tasks. Yet it's that same juggling of different tools that creates confusion, frustration, an oft-heard complaint of tool bloat, and ultimately leads to slower performance.

Go to Advanced Observability Teams See Big Efficiency Gains - Part 2

George Miranda is Product Marketing Director at Honeycomb.io

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Advanced Observability Teams See Big Efficiency Gains - Part 1

George Miranda
Honeycomb.io

As our production application systems continuously increase in complexity, the challenges of understanding, debugging, and improving them keep growing by orders of magnitude. The practice of Observability addresses both the social and the technological challenges of wrangling complexity and working toward achieving production excellence. New research shows how observable systems and practices are changing the application performance management (APM) landscape.

Observability Requires Both Technical and Social Approaches

Tooling alone can't solve anything, it's just a necessary part of any solution. Tackling the challenges of managing complex production systems isn't just a technical problem and it isn't just a social problem. We manage sociotechnical systems and any reasonable solution must take that into account in order to be effective.

Observability isn't logs, metrics, and tracing. Yes, those aspects are important. Those tools can help shed light on what's happening in the systems that are critical to your business. However, there's a big difference between having tools that provide instrumentation and using them to achieve better outcomes. Many of today's tools require you to predict the future by knowing in advance what conditions to monitor, which trends to look for, or the correlations you need to make to find application performance hotspots.

The coveted observability sweet spot is finding the unknown unknowns. Observability is a sociotechnical practice that allows you to answer any arbitrary questions about your environment, without needing to know ahead of time what you wanted to ask. However, it's doing the work that proves a bit more challenging for many teams, especially those weaning off legacy tools.

Practicing observability is a journey. It takes time for entire teams to adopt new practices and shift mindsets to a model of shared ownership. Our new study shows how different teams are practicing, or intending to practice, observability within the next two years. The report also examines the challenges teams face and the practices they are implementing as they progress on their observability journey.

Observability Maturity Research Findings

Teams must decide how to start their observability journey. Those early decisions have a high degree of impact because they influence both tool choices and habits during the software development and delivery lifecycle. Teams that adopt recommended observability practise to an advanced degree see greater benefits than less advanced teams. Advanced teams stabilize their systems, spend less time reactively fixing issues in production/refactoring code/resolving technical debt, and spend more time proactively innovating. 

The report affirms that adopting observability tools, site reliability engineering (SRE) practices, and a culture of shared ownership translates to efficiencies across the software engineering cycle, better end-user experiences, and ultimately helps teams achieve production excellence.

Outcomes are much more pronounced when teams apply observability mindsets and processes in conjunction with tooling. That combination can lead to a virtuous cycle of reinforcement, presuming those teams are using tools purposely designed to address observability use-cases. Research findings show that most teams adopt a handful of tools across disparate teams to accomplish daily tasks. Yet it's that same juggling of different tools that creates confusion, frustration, an oft-heard complaint of tool bloat, and ultimately leads to slower performance.

Go to Advanced Observability Teams See Big Efficiency Gains - Part 2

George Miranda is Product Marketing Director at Honeycomb.io

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...