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Majority of Organizations Cannot Realize Full Potential of Observability

Although 78% of organizations surveyed have an observability practice in place, 91% said they face challenges that prevent them from realizing the full potential of the systems they have already deployed, according to Observability and Demystifying AIOps, a report from Chronosphere and the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

Scalability and reliability of the observability tools were cited as the top concerns.

Additional survey findings include:

Observability tool sprawl is expanding

A majority of organizations reported at least 6 different tools in use, with more than half (52%) using 11-20 different tools. The report also shows that 72% of organizations agree that the number of tools they use adds complexity.

Explosive observability data growth

Additionally, 69% of survey respondents reported that the most costly line item for most observability solutions, data storage, is growing. Respondents stated that "the amount of observability data is growing at a concerning rate" and one in five respondents reported that this explosive data growth was their top concern.

To address data growth, organizations are taking a mix of steps to rein in costs, including:

■ increasing storage spend (52%)

■ limiting the number of observed applications in their environment (44%)

■ limiting the number of observed metrics per application (43%).

Cloud is greatest Observability challenge

Many respondents also noted that applications deployed in the cloud were harder for them to monitor and few of them felt that their observability solution was helping them meet their availability goals.

When asked about their biggest observability challenges, 60% agreed that "Lack of visibility into our cloud applications makes achieving SLAs a challenge," and only 20% chose "Improved SLA Performance" as one of their monitoring/observability strategy's most impactful benefits.

Methodology: TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) surveyed 374 IT (58%) and DevOps/AppDev (42%) professionals responsible for evaluating, purchasing, managing, and using observability at large midmarket (500 to 999 employees) (11%) and enterprise (1,000+ employees) (89%) organizations in North America (US and Canada).

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Majority of Organizations Cannot Realize Full Potential of Observability

Although 78% of organizations surveyed have an observability practice in place, 91% said they face challenges that prevent them from realizing the full potential of the systems they have already deployed, according to Observability and Demystifying AIOps, a report from Chronosphere and the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).

Scalability and reliability of the observability tools were cited as the top concerns.

Additional survey findings include:

Observability tool sprawl is expanding

A majority of organizations reported at least 6 different tools in use, with more than half (52%) using 11-20 different tools. The report also shows that 72% of organizations agree that the number of tools they use adds complexity.

Explosive observability data growth

Additionally, 69% of survey respondents reported that the most costly line item for most observability solutions, data storage, is growing. Respondents stated that "the amount of observability data is growing at a concerning rate" and one in five respondents reported that this explosive data growth was their top concern.

To address data growth, organizations are taking a mix of steps to rein in costs, including:

■ increasing storage spend (52%)

■ limiting the number of observed applications in their environment (44%)

■ limiting the number of observed metrics per application (43%).

Cloud is greatest Observability challenge

Many respondents also noted that applications deployed in the cloud were harder for them to monitor and few of them felt that their observability solution was helping them meet their availability goals.

When asked about their biggest observability challenges, 60% agreed that "Lack of visibility into our cloud applications makes achieving SLAs a challenge," and only 20% chose "Improved SLA Performance" as one of their monitoring/observability strategy's most impactful benefits.

Methodology: TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) surveyed 374 IT (58%) and DevOps/AppDev (42%) professionals responsible for evaluating, purchasing, managing, and using observability at large midmarket (500 to 999 employees) (11%) and enterprise (1,000+ employees) (89%) organizations in North America (US and Canada).

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 ...