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Observability Benefits: Operational Efficiency, Faster Innovation and Better Business Outcomes

Companies implementing observability benefit from increased operational efficiency, faster innovation, and better business outcomes overall, according to 2023 IT Trends Report: Lessons From Observability Leaders, a report from SolarWinds.

The report highlights a stark contrast between enterprises that have embraced observability and their peers who have not. Among the findings, the survey uncovered that observability leaders — those who follow best practices to leverage observability and report experiencing better business and IT outcomes as a result — are three times more likely to say their organization is:

■ doing extremely well with growing revenue.

■ more than twice as likely to say the same about operational efficiency.

■ 2.5 times more likely to say they're excelling with the speed of innovation.

Observability leaders also gave higher ratings to their organization's employee experience, including lower levels of reported employee burnout and fewer skill gaps on their teams.

These takeaways come at a critical time, as IT environments become increasingly complex, and companies experience more challenges in efficiently addressing IT issues as a result. According to the findings, the typical enterprise suffers from an average of nine brownouts or outages every month, lasting around twelve hours each, at an average annual cost of $13.7MM.


Observability has emerged as a solution to not only preemptively detect anomalies and potential issues before they escalate into full-blown outages but to proactively address those issues at the root cause and prevent future outages.

"Outages and security concerns are no longer just an IT problem, and observability is no longer just an IT solution," said Jeff Stewart, Field CTO and VP, Global Solutions Engineering at SolarWinds. "The better business, innovation, and technology outcomes experienced by observability leaders prove the benefits to every level, department, and employee. The findings of this year's report should serve as an urgent call to action for business leaders who believe they can't afford to invest in observability tools — when the truth is that we're rapidly entering a landscape in which companies simply can't afford to risk being without them."

The survey also highlighted trends among the observability leaders reporting fewer and less frequent challenges in their ecosystem, finding the majority are:

Investing in top priorities

Data shows organizations using observability solutions to support the priorities most critical to their growth and success:

■ improve their customer experience (96%)

■ enable faster innovation (71%)

■ reduce time spent solving (71%)

■ detect (60%) issues

■ increase operational efficiency (55%)

More automated and integrated

Observability leaders embracing automation and investing in tools that provide enhanced efficiency are:

■ 214% more likely to say they are doing extremely well with operational efficiency.

■ 750% more likely to say they are doing extremely well with auto-remediation of complex alerts.

■ 300% better at automatically collecting background diagnostic data for IT support staff.

Ahead on IT

The data found that those ahead of the curve on observability are also leading by huge margins when it comes to monitoring, detecting, and resolving issues that could otherwise bring the business to a screeching halt.

When it comes to IT, they are:

■ 233% better at auto-escalation of tickets.

■ 213% better at auto-remediation of simple alerts.

■ 36% better at settling alert levels based on historical behavior.

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Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

Observability Benefits: Operational Efficiency, Faster Innovation and Better Business Outcomes

Companies implementing observability benefit from increased operational efficiency, faster innovation, and better business outcomes overall, according to 2023 IT Trends Report: Lessons From Observability Leaders, a report from SolarWinds.

The report highlights a stark contrast between enterprises that have embraced observability and their peers who have not. Among the findings, the survey uncovered that observability leaders — those who follow best practices to leverage observability and report experiencing better business and IT outcomes as a result — are three times more likely to say their organization is:

■ doing extremely well with growing revenue.

■ more than twice as likely to say the same about operational efficiency.

■ 2.5 times more likely to say they're excelling with the speed of innovation.

Observability leaders also gave higher ratings to their organization's employee experience, including lower levels of reported employee burnout and fewer skill gaps on their teams.

These takeaways come at a critical time, as IT environments become increasingly complex, and companies experience more challenges in efficiently addressing IT issues as a result. According to the findings, the typical enterprise suffers from an average of nine brownouts or outages every month, lasting around twelve hours each, at an average annual cost of $13.7MM.


Observability has emerged as a solution to not only preemptively detect anomalies and potential issues before they escalate into full-blown outages but to proactively address those issues at the root cause and prevent future outages.

"Outages and security concerns are no longer just an IT problem, and observability is no longer just an IT solution," said Jeff Stewart, Field CTO and VP, Global Solutions Engineering at SolarWinds. "The better business, innovation, and technology outcomes experienced by observability leaders prove the benefits to every level, department, and employee. The findings of this year's report should serve as an urgent call to action for business leaders who believe they can't afford to invest in observability tools — when the truth is that we're rapidly entering a landscape in which companies simply can't afford to risk being without them."

The survey also highlighted trends among the observability leaders reporting fewer and less frequent challenges in their ecosystem, finding the majority are:

Investing in top priorities

Data shows organizations using observability solutions to support the priorities most critical to their growth and success:

■ improve their customer experience (96%)

■ enable faster innovation (71%)

■ reduce time spent solving (71%)

■ detect (60%) issues

■ increase operational efficiency (55%)

More automated and integrated

Observability leaders embracing automation and investing in tools that provide enhanced efficiency are:

■ 214% more likely to say they are doing extremely well with operational efficiency.

■ 750% more likely to say they are doing extremely well with auto-remediation of complex alerts.

■ 300% better at automatically collecting background diagnostic data for IT support staff.

Ahead on IT

The data found that those ahead of the curve on observability are also leading by huge margins when it comes to monitoring, detecting, and resolving issues that could otherwise bring the business to a screeching halt.

When it comes to IT, they are:

■ 233% better at auto-escalation of tickets.

■ 213% better at auto-remediation of simple alerts.

■ 36% better at settling alert levels based on historical behavior.

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...