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Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Applied Observability and Digital Immune System

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Gartner announced the list of 10 top strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in 2023, and two technologies in particular will be of special interest to APMdigest readers: Applied Observability and Digital Immune System.

Gartner says this year's top strategic technology trends will drive significant disruption and opportunity over the next five to 10 years.

Digital Immune System

76% of teams responsible for digital products are now also responsible for revenue generation. CIOs are looking for new practices and approaches that their teams can adopt to deliver that high business value, along with mitigating risk and increasing customer satisfaction. A digital immune system provides such a roadmap.

In a recent Gartner article, Joachim Herschmann, Senior Director Analyst on the Application Design and Development team at Gartner, explains: "A digital immune system combines a range of practices and technologies from software design, development, automation, operations and analytics to create superior user experience (UX) and reduce system failures that impact business performance. A DIS protects applications and services in order to make them more resilient so that they recover quickly from failures"

Digital immunity combines data-driven insight into operations, automated and extreme testing, automated incident resolution, software engineering within IT operations and security in the application supply chain to increase the resilience and stability of systems.

Herschmann says the prerequisites for a strong digital immune system include:

■ Observability

■ AI-augmented testing

■ Chaos engineering

■ Autoremediation

■ Site reliability engineering (SRE)

■ Software supply chain security

Gartner predicts that by 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity will reduce system downtime by up to 80% — and that translates directly into higher revenue.

Applied Observability

Observable data reflects the digitized artifacts, such as logs, traces, API calls, dwell time, downloads and file transfers, that appear when any stakeholder takes any kind of action. Applied observability feeds these observable artifacts back in a highly orchestrated and integrated approach to accelerate organizational decision-making.

"Applied observability enables organizations to exploit their data artifacts for competitive advantage," said Frances Karamouzis, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. "It is powerful because it elevates the strategic importance of the right data at the right time for rapid action based on confirmed stakeholder actions, rather than intentions. When planned strategically and executed successfully, applied observability is the most powerful source of data-driven decision-making."

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2023: Applied Observability and Digital Immune System

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

Gartner announced the list of 10 top strategic technology trends that organizations need to explore in 2023, and two technologies in particular will be of special interest to APMdigest readers: Applied Observability and Digital Immune System.

Gartner says this year's top strategic technology trends will drive significant disruption and opportunity over the next five to 10 years.

Digital Immune System

76% of teams responsible for digital products are now also responsible for revenue generation. CIOs are looking for new practices and approaches that their teams can adopt to deliver that high business value, along with mitigating risk and increasing customer satisfaction. A digital immune system provides such a roadmap.

In a recent Gartner article, Joachim Herschmann, Senior Director Analyst on the Application Design and Development team at Gartner, explains: "A digital immune system combines a range of practices and technologies from software design, development, automation, operations and analytics to create superior user experience (UX) and reduce system failures that impact business performance. A DIS protects applications and services in order to make them more resilient so that they recover quickly from failures"

Digital immunity combines data-driven insight into operations, automated and extreme testing, automated incident resolution, software engineering within IT operations and security in the application supply chain to increase the resilience and stability of systems.

Herschmann says the prerequisites for a strong digital immune system include:

■ Observability

■ AI-augmented testing

■ Chaos engineering

■ Autoremediation

■ Site reliability engineering (SRE)

■ Software supply chain security

Gartner predicts that by 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity will reduce system downtime by up to 80% — and that translates directly into higher revenue.

Applied Observability

Observable data reflects the digitized artifacts, such as logs, traces, API calls, dwell time, downloads and file transfers, that appear when any stakeholder takes any kind of action. Applied observability feeds these observable artifacts back in a highly orchestrated and integrated approach to accelerate organizational decision-making.

"Applied observability enables organizations to exploit their data artifacts for competitive advantage," said Frances Karamouzis, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. "It is powerful because it elevates the strategic importance of the right data at the right time for rapid action based on confirmed stakeholder actions, rather than intentions. When planned strategically and executed successfully, applied observability is the most powerful source of data-driven decision-making."

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

Hot Topics

The Latest

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.