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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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.

Related Links

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When the Database Is the Problem, Is APM Enough?

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

From Cleanup to Prevention: The Future of Cloud-Native Cost Optimization

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

The Real Enterprise AI Risk Isn't Hallucinations

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

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The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

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The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

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The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

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Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

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Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...