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Observability Survey 2023: Centralization Saves Time and Money

Organizations are challenged by tool sprawl and data source overload, according to the Grafana Labs Observability Survey 2023, with 52% of respondents reporting that their companies use 6 or more observability tools, including 11% that use 16 or more.

To combat this, 70% of respondents say their companies have centralized observability, and of those, 83% have saved time or money as a result.

Other key takeaways from the report include:

Tool and data overload varies across industry and company size

Larger organizations tend to use more data sources: 41% of companies with more than 1,000 employees pull in 10+ data sources, compared to just 7% for companies with 100 employees or fewer.

Industries leading in observability tool usage were financial services (31% use 10 or more tools) and government (27% use 10 or more tools).

Organizations are at different stages in their observability journey

Nearly one-third of respondents have not centralized observability yet, and some industries are further along than others.

For example, 70% of financial sector companies have adopted centralized observability and saved time and money as a result, compared to 58% across all sectors.

Not all ROI is the same

Different organizations have different objectives with their observability strategies. Yes, saving money is the overarching goal, but there are multiple paths to get there, including MTTx improvements, less toil and infrastructure maintenance, better adoption, increased developer productivity, less complexity, service level objectives (SLOs), better capacity planning, and better alerting and visibility.

Among all respondents, 37% say they prioritize capacity planning when correlating data, 25% prioritize cost control, and 9% prioritize profitability and margin calculation.

Accountability, market maturity comes to observability

The proper execution of SLOs is a good sign of a mature observability strategy. Most respondents say they are using them or moving in that direction, but they're not all at the same stage. Moreover, only slightly more are actively using SLIs/SLOs (28%) than those that don't have them on their radar (21%).

Methodology: Grafana Labs developed the survey — which included questions about the tools, strategies, benefits, and challenges around observability — and solicited responses through newsletters, live events, social media, and its own website. The company also conducted interviews with observability practitioners about how their companies are addressing some of the benefits and challenges presented in our key findings.

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Observability Survey 2023: Centralization Saves Time and Money

Organizations are challenged by tool sprawl and data source overload, according to the Grafana Labs Observability Survey 2023, with 52% of respondents reporting that their companies use 6 or more observability tools, including 11% that use 16 or more.

To combat this, 70% of respondents say their companies have centralized observability, and of those, 83% have saved time or money as a result.

Other key takeaways from the report include:

Tool and data overload varies across industry and company size

Larger organizations tend to use more data sources: 41% of companies with more than 1,000 employees pull in 10+ data sources, compared to just 7% for companies with 100 employees or fewer.

Industries leading in observability tool usage were financial services (31% use 10 or more tools) and government (27% use 10 or more tools).

Organizations are at different stages in their observability journey

Nearly one-third of respondents have not centralized observability yet, and some industries are further along than others.

For example, 70% of financial sector companies have adopted centralized observability and saved time and money as a result, compared to 58% across all sectors.

Not all ROI is the same

Different organizations have different objectives with their observability strategies. Yes, saving money is the overarching goal, but there are multiple paths to get there, including MTTx improvements, less toil and infrastructure maintenance, better adoption, increased developer productivity, less complexity, service level objectives (SLOs), better capacity planning, and better alerting and visibility.

Among all respondents, 37% say they prioritize capacity planning when correlating data, 25% prioritize cost control, and 9% prioritize profitability and margin calculation.

Accountability, market maturity comes to observability

The proper execution of SLOs is a good sign of a mature observability strategy. Most respondents say they are using them or moving in that direction, but they're not all at the same stage. Moreover, only slightly more are actively using SLIs/SLOs (28%) than those that don't have them on their radar (21%).

Methodology: Grafana Labs developed the survey — which included questions about the tools, strategies, benefits, and challenges around observability — and solicited responses through newsletters, live events, social media, and its own website. The company also conducted interviews with observability practitioners about how their companies are addressing some of the benefits and challenges presented in our key findings.

The Latest

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...