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SLOs Drive Operational Efficiencies, Visibility and Improved Business Benefits

As SLOs (service level objectives) 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, based on a survey of more than 300 IT professionals and executives conducted with Dimensional Research.


In addition, 95% of respondents say SLOs help them make better business decisions with 27% of companies stating that SLOs have saved them $500,000 or more.

SLOs are becoming an essential way to increase operational efficiency and improve business processes

"It was incredibly impressive to see the year over year growth in the market and the consistency of responses from our survey last year," said Marcin Kurc, co-founder and CEO, Nobl9. "The responses align with what we are seeing in the market. Enterprises across all industries are increasing their focus on system reliability to ensure customer experience, and doing this by finding new ways to leverage their new and legacy monitoring and observability tools. SLOs are becoming an essential way to increase operational efficiency and improve business processes."

Companies use observability tools to provide visibility and enable key functions such as security, operational efficiency, capacity planning, customer support, and increase development velocity. With fragmented tools — 72% use more than six observability tools — companies need to gain visibility not by consolidation that would hurt productivity, but by creating consistent definitions of reliability and expectations for various services.

"The survey responses are indicative of the broader trends we are seeing in the market around companies focusing on operational efficiency and business agility," said Stephen Elliott, Group VP, I&O, Cloud Operations and DevOps, IDC. "The pandemic drove more companies to the cloud, and with that, we have identified observability and monitoring to be key areas of focus. SLOs are one way for companies to manage their resources and get the most out of them."

Other key findings include:

■ 80% have an increased focus on system reliability due to the pandemic driving cloud adoption, remote workers and supply chain issues.

■ 94% are pursuing system reliability engineering, with most tasks being assigned to IT operations.

■ The ways companies are using monitoring and observability tools is increasing. More than 13 initiatives rely on monitoring and reliability with the most common being security, operations performance (uptime, performance, efficiency) and capacity planning.

■ Respondents identified 10 areas that require monitoring beyond networks, applications and databases, but most lack visibility, and the number is expected to grow.

■ 72% of companies use six or more monitoring and observability tools.

■ 76% prevented business interruptions using SLOs — but 9% have not implemented thresholds yet.

Methodology: All respondents had observability and monitoring responsibilities, and were IT professionals and executives at medium to large enterprise companies representing all seniority levels. Participants represented dozens of countries from five continents providing a global market perspective.

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SLOs Drive Operational Efficiencies, Visibility and Improved Business Benefits

As SLOs (service level objectives) 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, based on a survey of more than 300 IT professionals and executives conducted with Dimensional Research.


In addition, 95% of respondents say SLOs help them make better business decisions with 27% of companies stating that SLOs have saved them $500,000 or more.

SLOs are becoming an essential way to increase operational efficiency and improve business processes

"It was incredibly impressive to see the year over year growth in the market and the consistency of responses from our survey last year," said Marcin Kurc, co-founder and CEO, Nobl9. "The responses align with what we are seeing in the market. Enterprises across all industries are increasing their focus on system reliability to ensure customer experience, and doing this by finding new ways to leverage their new and legacy monitoring and observability tools. SLOs are becoming an essential way to increase operational efficiency and improve business processes."

Companies use observability tools to provide visibility and enable key functions such as security, operational efficiency, capacity planning, customer support, and increase development velocity. With fragmented tools — 72% use more than six observability tools — companies need to gain visibility not by consolidation that would hurt productivity, but by creating consistent definitions of reliability and expectations for various services.

"The survey responses are indicative of the broader trends we are seeing in the market around companies focusing on operational efficiency and business agility," said Stephen Elliott, Group VP, I&O, Cloud Operations and DevOps, IDC. "The pandemic drove more companies to the cloud, and with that, we have identified observability and monitoring to be key areas of focus. SLOs are one way for companies to manage their resources and get the most out of them."

Other key findings include:

■ 80% have an increased focus on system reliability due to the pandemic driving cloud adoption, remote workers and supply chain issues.

■ 94% are pursuing system reliability engineering, with most tasks being assigned to IT operations.

■ The ways companies are using monitoring and observability tools is increasing. More than 13 initiatives rely on monitoring and reliability with the most common being security, operations performance (uptime, performance, efficiency) and capacity planning.

■ Respondents identified 10 areas that require monitoring beyond networks, applications and databases, but most lack visibility, and the number is expected to grow.

■ 72% of companies use six or more monitoring and observability tools.

■ 76% prevented business interruptions using SLOs — but 9% have not implemented thresholds yet.

Methodology: All respondents had observability and monitoring responsibilities, and were IT professionals and executives at medium to large enterprise companies representing all seniority levels. Participants represented dozens of countries from five continents providing a global market perspective.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...