SLOs Drive Operational Efficiencies, Visibility and Improved Business Benefits

Learn more about Nobl9

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

Learn more about Nobl9

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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Escaping Pilot Purgatory: How AI Becomes an Operational Advantage

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

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Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

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The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

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In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

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AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.