Engineers Waste 25% of the Work Week on Troubleshooting
It's time to rethink the industry's approach to observability in a cloud native world
January 24, 2023

Rachel Dines
Chronosphere

Share this

Driven by the need to create scalable, faster, and more agile systems, businesses are adopting cloud native approaches. But cloud native environments also come with an explosion of data and complexity that makes it harder for businesses to detect and remediate issues before everything comes to a screeching halt. Observability, if done right, can make it easier to mitigate these challenges and remediate incidents before they become major customer-impacting problems.

To understand the challenges teams face while working on cloud native environments — and what happens when their observability functions fall short — Chronosphere surveyed over 500 engineers and software developers. The culmination is the 2023 Cloud Native Observability Report: Overcoming Cloud Native Complexity, which details the promise and pitfalls of cloud native observability in 2023.

The report revealed that engineers waste an average of 10 hours or 25% of every work week trying to triage and understand incidents. Nearly all (96%) report that they spend most of their time resolving low level issues, and a third say that the stress of this constant troubleshooting is disrupting their personal lives. The aggregation of lost hours is costing US businesses over $44 billion productivity each year. This lack of efficiency is especially troublesome in today's economy where everyone is being asked to do more with less and watching the bottom line has become today's business mantra.


The silver lining is that observability offers massive benefits beyond remediation of incidents. 67% of those surveyed say having a strong observability function provides the foundation for all business value and 71% say their business can't innovate effectively without good observability. Yet, paradoxically, most surveyed aren't satisfied with their current solution, saying it's too slow, lacks context, requires a lot of time and effort, and is generally unhelpful.

All of this points to the conclusion that observability is required for business success — and perhaps business survival — but that the current approaches and solutions need to be completely rethought if they are to be sustainable in what is becoming a cloud native world.

What does a strong observability solution look like? It's not checking boxes on metrics, tracing, and logs — they are a means to an end. Strong observability enables teams to know, triage and understand so they can have quicker and better outcomes. The good news is that teams with a holistic plan backed by a modern observability vendor can provide a boost over other options. In fact, those using a vendor solution are detecting issues 65% faster than those without a cohesive approach. The survey also notes businesses using vendor solutions are three times more satisfied with their approach to observability than those using home-built solutions.

Chart the right course and observability can efficiently and effectively safeguard your business from incidents that jeopardize your brand. For those that take a wrong turn, it's often at their own peril. Without effective solutions, engineering talent will be lost, time that could have been spent on innovation will be wasted, and companies will be at risk of losing customers and significant revenue.

Rachel Dines is Head of Product and Developer Marketing at Chronosphere
Share this

The Latest

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...

March 14, 2024

The integration and maintenance of AI-enabled Software as a Service (SaaS) applications have emerged as pivotal points in enterprise AI implementation strategies, offering both significant challenges and promising benefits. Despite the enthusiasm surrounding AI's potential impact, the reality of its implementation presents hurdles. Currently, over 90% of enterprises are grappling with limitations in integrating AI into their tech stack ...

March 13, 2024

In the intricate landscape of IT infrastructure, one critical component often relegated to the back burner is Active Directory (AD) forest recovery — an oversight with costly consequences ...

March 12, 2024

eBPF is a technology that allows users to run custom programs inside the Linux kernel, which changes the behavior of the kernel and makes execution up to 10x faster(link is external) and more efficient for key parts of what makes our computing lives work. That includes observability, networking and security ...

March 11, 2024

Data mesh, an increasingly important decentralized approach to data architecture and organizational design, focuses on treating data as a product, emphasizing domain-oriented data ownership, self-service tools and federated governance. The 2024 State of the Data Lakehouse report from Dremio presents evidence of the growing adoption of data mesh architectures in enterprises ... The report highlights that the drive towards data mesh is increasingly becoming a business strategy to enhance agility and speed in problem-solving and innovation ...

March 07, 2024
In this digital era, consumers prefer a seamless user experience, and here, the significance of performance testing cannot be overstated. Application performance testing is essential in ensuring that your software products, websites, or other related systems operate seamlessly under varying conditions. However, the cost of poor performance extends beyond technical glitches and slow load times; it can directly affect customer satisfaction and brand reputation. Understand the tangible and intangible consequences of poor application performance and how it can affect your business ...
March 06, 2024

Too much traffic can crash a website ... That stampede of traffic is even more horrifying when it's part of a malicious denial of service attack ... These attacks are becoming more common, more sophisticated and increasingly tied to ransomware-style demands. So it's no wonder that the threat of DDoS remains one of the many things that keep IT and marketing leaders up at night ...

March 05, 2024

Today, applications serve as the backbone of businesses, and therefore, ensuring optimal performance has never been more critical. This is where application performance monitoring (APM) emerges as an indispensable tool, empowering organizations to safeguard their applications proactively, match user expectations, and drive growth. But APM is not without its challenges. Choosing to implement APM is a path that's not easily realized, even if it offers great benefits. This blog deals with the potential hurdles that may manifest when you actualize your APM strategy in your IT application environment ...

March 04, 2024

This year's Super Bowl drew in viewership of nearly 124 million viewers and made history as the most-watched live broadcast event since the 1969 moon landing. To support this spike in viewership, streaming companies like YouTube TV, Hulu and Paramount+ began preparing their IT infrastructure months in advance to ensure an exceptional viewer experience without outages or major interruptions. New Relic conducted a survey to understand the importance of a seamless viewing experience and the impact of outages during major streaming events such as the Super Bowl ...