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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
Rachel Dines
Chronosphere

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
APM

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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
Rachel Dines
Chronosphere

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
APM

Hot Topics

The Latest

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

Two in three IT professionals now cite growing complexity as their top challenge — an urgent signal that the modernization curve may be getting too steep, according to the Rising to the Challenge survey from Checkmk ...

While IT leaders are becoming more comfortable and adept at balancing workloads across on-premises, colocation data centers and the public cloud, there's a key component missing: connectivity, according to the 2025 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite ...

A perfect storm is brewing in cybersecurity — certificate lifespans shrinking to just 47 days while quantum computing threatens today's encryption. Organizations must embrace ephemeral trust and crypto-agility to survive this dual challenge ...