The most sophisticated observability practitioners (leaders) are able to cut downtime costs by 90%, from an estimated $23.8 million annually to just $2.5 million, compared to observability beginners, according to the State of Observability 2022 from Splunk in collaboration with the Enterprise Strategy Group.
What's more, leaders in observability are more innovative and more successful at achieving digital transformation outcomes and other initiatives:
■ Observability leaders have launched 60% more products or revenue streams from AppDev teams in the last year compared to beginners.
■ Observability leaders report a 69% better mean time to resolution for unplanned downtime or performance degradation thanks to investment in observability.
■ 66% of leaders report that their visibility into application performance is excellent (compared to just 44% of beginners). Similarly, 64% of leaders report that visibility into their security posture is excellent (versus 42% of beginners).
■ Twice as many leaders can detect problems associated with internally developed applications within minutes, resulting in an estimated 37% better MTTD.
"Our research confirms just how vital observability is for every business," said Spiros Xanthos, SVP and General Manager, Observability, Splunk. "The most sophisticated observability practitioners have given themselves an edge in digital transformation while massively cutting costs associated with downtime and boosting their ability to out-innovate the competition. These observability leaders are more competitive, more resilient and more efficient as a result."
Increased cloud complexity also highlights how imperative becoming an observability leader is for all enterprises. Organizations have been moving to the cloud for more than a decade and in more recent years, hybrid architectures and multicloud operations have complicated many organizations' cloud ecosystems.
70% of respondents are using multiple cloud services, and the shift to multicloud has increased complexity:
■ 75% of respondents have many cloud-native applications that run in multiple environments, either multiple public clouds or a combination of on-premises and public clouds.
■ Leaders are even more likely to report commonly running cloud-native applications (92% versus 68% of beginners),
■ 36% of organizations (and 47% of leaders) that use the public cloud to run internally developed applications use three or more different public clouds today, and 67% expect to do so within 24 months.
While the challenges of observability are global, the report reveals that there are significant variations across countries:
■ Canadian organizations trail in their observability journey: 79% are beginners (versus 58% averaged across other countries) and just 2% are leaders (versus 10% in the rest of the world).
■ French organizations more often report that their investments in AIOps technologies have helped them achieve lower mean time to resolution (MTTR) (58% versus 43% averaged across other countries).
■ Japanese organizations have had noteworthy success using AIOps technologies to help solve recurring issues in their environment: 74% report that this has been a benefit of AIOps, versus a 55% average across other countries.
■ Indian organizations are further along in the observability journey: Only 29% are rated as beginners, versus 62% on average across other countries.
For organizations across the globe looking to invest in observability, a lack of staff is one of the biggest hindrances in improving observability. Among respondents, 95% reported challenges in finding staff to monitor and manage infrastructure and application availability, while 81% of enterprises said a lack of staff had led to projects and initiatives failing.
"Organizations that use the right observability tools and practices and build to attract talent stand the best chance of becoming leaders in observability," said Xanthos. "By tackling data volume and variety with AI, organizations can alleviate staffing concerns, while at the same time investing in skills training to draw in the very best talent available. Consolidating vendors and rationalizing tools will also allow companies to curate the vendor and tool set that gives them the most visibility with the least drag, lessening the potential for staff burnout in the process."
Methodology: The global survey was conducted from early-February through mid-February 2022 in partnership with the Enterprise Strategy Group. The 1,250 application development and IT operations leaders who spend more than half of their time on observability issues were drawn from 11 regions: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, The United Kingdom and the United States.
The Latest
The journey of maturing observability practices for users entails navigating peaks and valleys. Users have clearly witnessed the maturation of their monitoring capabilities, embraced DevOps practices, and adopted cloud and cloud-native technologies. Notwithstanding that, we witness the gradual increase of the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) for production issues year over year ...
Optimizing existing use of cloud is the top initiative — for the seventh year in a row, reported by 62% of respondents in the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report ...
Gartner highlighted four trends impacting cloud, data center and edge infrastructure in 2023, as infrastructure and operations teams pivot to support new technologies and ways of working during a year of economic uncertainty ...
Developers need a tool that can be portable and vendor agnostic, given the advent of microservices. It may be clear an issue is occurring; what may not be clear is if it's part of a distributed system or the app itself. Enter OpenTelemetry, commonly referred to as OTel, an open-source framework that provides a standardized way of collecting and exporting telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native software ...
As SLOs grow in popularity their usage is becoming more mature. For example, 82% of respondents intend to increase their use of SLOs, and 96% have mapped SLOs directly to their business operations or already have a plan to, according to The State of Service Level Objectives 2023 from Nobl9 ...
Observability has matured beyond its early adopter position and is now foundational for modern enterprises to achieve full visibility into today's complex technology environments, according to The State of Observability 2023, a report released by Splunk in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group ...
Before network engineers even begin the automation process, they tend to start with preconceived notions that oftentimes, if acted upon, can hinder the process. To prevent that from happening, it's important to identify and dispel a few common misconceptions currently out there and how networking teams can overcome them. So, let's address the three most common network automation myths ...
Many IT organizations apply AI/ML and AIOps technology across domains, correlating insights from the various layers of IT infrastructure and operations. However, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has observed significant interest in applying these AI technologies narrowly to network management, according to a new research report, titled AI-Driven Networks: Leveling Up Network Management with AI/ML and AIOps ...
When it comes to system outages, AIOps solutions with the right foundation can help reduce the blame game so the right teams can spend valuable time restoring the impacted services rather than improving their MTTI score (mean time to innocence). In fact, much of today's innovation around ChatGPT-style algorithms can be used to significantly improve the triage process and user experience ...
Gartner identified the top 10 data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2023 that can guide D&A leaders to create new sources of value by anticipating change and transforming extreme uncertainty into new business opportunities ...