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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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For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

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

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...