According to an analysis from 130 enterprise organizations using the BigPanda platform, the Monitoring and Observability Tool Effectiveness for IT Event Management report, the average enterprise sends 9.6 million observability events annually to the platform, but fewer than 1 in 5 (18%) are ever acted upon.
Compounding the issue, 27% of alerts occur on weekends, creating unnecessary pressure on already overburdened on-call teams.
"The research confirms what many IT leaders already suspect," said Fred Koopmans, Chief Product Officer at BigPanda. "More monitoring coverage doesn't automatically mean more actionability. Enterprises are investing heavily in observability, but without context, correlation, and enrichment, the signal gets lost."
The report features a monitoring and observability tool effectiveness matrix that shows no monitoring and observability tools combined both widespread usage and consistently high actionability. This signals that even the strongest platforms have room to grow, and the observability industry is still evolving toward optimal performance at scale.
Other key trends and insights include:
Full monitoring coverage doesn't equal value
Most enterprises are drowning in data, creating millions of events (9.6 million, on average) annually. Yet only 18% of incidents were actioned on average, underscoring the disconnect between the belief that comprehensive observability coverage of applications, services, and infrastructure equates to better ITOps, incident management, and customer outcomes.
Some high-coverage tools fall short on signal quality
Some tools contributed a large share of incidents, yet struggle with their lower actionability, highlighting that high usage does not necessarily translate to high operational value. These scalable but noisy tools may benefit from improved configuration and tuning to reduce noise and enhance the precision of alerts.
Full-stack observability is still an illusion
Despite the notion that enterprise organizations are centralizing and consolidating observability with full-stack observability tools, our data shows that enterprises still have a median of 20+ tools they use to monitor on-premises and cloud infrastructure, application and digital experience monitoring.
Open-source remains low-impact at enterprise scale
Despite their popularity among developers, most open-source observability platforms and monitoring tools have yet to deliver high-value, enterprise-grade observability outcomes. Our report shows they frequently produce low-quality signals rather than actionable insights.
Purpose-built monitoring tools tend to align as either specialists or stragglers
They either fell in the top-left quadrant (optimized, high-performance tools) or the bottom-left quadrant (underutilized tools) with lower adoption and weaker signal quality. This indicates that while some purpose-built monitoring tools deliver substantial niche value, others have yet to evolve into broader observability assets.
These results highlight a clear opportunity for IT leaders: consolidate around high-performing tools, decommission low-value ones, and use enriched event data to guide smarter investments.