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).