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Observability Leaders Report Fewer Outages

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.


The research shows that observability is instrumental in reducing outages, improving app reliability, growing revenue, strengthening customer experience (CX) and establishing digital resilience.

A key finding is how observability leaders are four times as likely to resolve instances of unplanned downtime in minutes, versus hours or days. This is notable as 76% of all respondents report that downtime can cost up to $500,000 per hour. It's clear that a faster approach to issue resolution can drive significant cost savings.

Key findings from the research also include:

Fewer outages, disruptions to customers

Leaders experience 33% less outages per year than beginners. (On average, beginners report six outages, while leaders experience two.)

Greater visual clarity drives ROI

Due to observability, a little over 80% of organizations can find and fix problems faster. In addition, 81% can see into hybrid ecosystems.

Stronger assurance to meet reliability goals

89% of leaders are completely confident in their ability to meet availability and performance requirements for their applications, 3.9x the rate of beginners.

Hybrid will persist

Organizations report maintaining 165 business applications (on average), with about half in the public cloud and half on-premises. As the number of apps grows, observability will remain vital to unify visibility across environments.

AIOps instrumental to CX

AIOps capabilities included in an observability practice outperform legacy solutions, by automatically determining the technical root cause of an issue (according to 34% of respondents,) to predicting problems before they turn into customer-impacting incidents (31%), to better assessing the severity of an incident (30%).

Resilience as North Star

95% say their observability leaders are collaborating more with line-of-business leaders on resilience strategies, which includes investing in solutions that recover customer services faster and remediate incidents more efficiently.

Communications and media lead in maturity

Communications and media companies are leading the way on observability savviness, with 13% tallied as leaders. Manufacturing and financial services followed with 8% categorized as leaders.

Public sector makes gains with leaders

The public sector tallied 4% as observability leaders, increasing from 0% in 2022, showing an opportunity for growth.

Unifying security monitoring and observability

The report shows how more organizations are unifying security monitoring and observability to obtain richer context on incidents and accelerate resolution, in comparison to last year. The reasons all respondents are choosing to unify include:

More granular and precise threat detection. 59% of all respondents uncover security issues more effectively, thanks to intelligence and correlation capabilities native to observability solutions.

A comprehensive approach. 55% uncover and assess more security vulnerabilities, thanks to the visibility afforded by observability solutions.

Ability to act quicker. 51% take action on security issues faster, thanks to the remediation capabilities of observability solutions.

"With the rising complexity of today's technology environments and the direct connection between reducing disruptions and optimal customer experiences, observability is fundamental to the successful operations of modern businesses," said Spiros Xanthos, SVP and GM for the Observability business at Splunk. "Observability enables businesses to keep their software and infrastructure reliable, systems secure and customers happy, making it a critical component to any organization's resilience strategy."

Methodology: The report defines observability leaders as organizations with at least 24 months of experience with observability. In addition, leaders achieved the highest rank in these five factors: the ability to correlate data across all observability tools, the adoption of AI/ML technology within their observability toolset, skills specialization in observability, the ability to cover both cloud-native and traditional application architectures and the adoption of AIOps.

The global survey was conducted from early December 2022 to mid-January 2023. The report surveyed 1,750 IT operations, application development and engineering leaders from organizations with 500 or more full-time employees and who are knowledgeable about their organization's observability practice. The survey respondents were drawn from 10 countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, UK and US.

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Observability Leaders Report Fewer Outages

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.


The research shows that observability is instrumental in reducing outages, improving app reliability, growing revenue, strengthening customer experience (CX) and establishing digital resilience.

A key finding is how observability leaders are four times as likely to resolve instances of unplanned downtime in minutes, versus hours or days. This is notable as 76% of all respondents report that downtime can cost up to $500,000 per hour. It's clear that a faster approach to issue resolution can drive significant cost savings.

Key findings from the research also include:

Fewer outages, disruptions to customers

Leaders experience 33% less outages per year than beginners. (On average, beginners report six outages, while leaders experience two.)

Greater visual clarity drives ROI

Due to observability, a little over 80% of organizations can find and fix problems faster. In addition, 81% can see into hybrid ecosystems.

Stronger assurance to meet reliability goals

89% of leaders are completely confident in their ability to meet availability and performance requirements for their applications, 3.9x the rate of beginners.

Hybrid will persist

Organizations report maintaining 165 business applications (on average), with about half in the public cloud and half on-premises. As the number of apps grows, observability will remain vital to unify visibility across environments.

AIOps instrumental to CX

AIOps capabilities included in an observability practice outperform legacy solutions, by automatically determining the technical root cause of an issue (according to 34% of respondents,) to predicting problems before they turn into customer-impacting incidents (31%), to better assessing the severity of an incident (30%).

Resilience as North Star

95% say their observability leaders are collaborating more with line-of-business leaders on resilience strategies, which includes investing in solutions that recover customer services faster and remediate incidents more efficiently.

Communications and media lead in maturity

Communications and media companies are leading the way on observability savviness, with 13% tallied as leaders. Manufacturing and financial services followed with 8% categorized as leaders.

Public sector makes gains with leaders

The public sector tallied 4% as observability leaders, increasing from 0% in 2022, showing an opportunity for growth.

Unifying security monitoring and observability

The report shows how more organizations are unifying security monitoring and observability to obtain richer context on incidents and accelerate resolution, in comparison to last year. The reasons all respondents are choosing to unify include:

More granular and precise threat detection. 59% of all respondents uncover security issues more effectively, thanks to intelligence and correlation capabilities native to observability solutions.

A comprehensive approach. 55% uncover and assess more security vulnerabilities, thanks to the visibility afforded by observability solutions.

Ability to act quicker. 51% take action on security issues faster, thanks to the remediation capabilities of observability solutions.

"With the rising complexity of today's technology environments and the direct connection between reducing disruptions and optimal customer experiences, observability is fundamental to the successful operations of modern businesses," said Spiros Xanthos, SVP and GM for the Observability business at Splunk. "Observability enables businesses to keep their software and infrastructure reliable, systems secure and customers happy, making it a critical component to any organization's resilience strategy."

Methodology: The report defines observability leaders as organizations with at least 24 months of experience with observability. In addition, leaders achieved the highest rank in these five factors: the ability to correlate data across all observability tools, the adoption of AI/ML technology within their observability toolset, skills specialization in observability, the ability to cover both cloud-native and traditional application architectures and the adoption of AIOps.

The global survey was conducted from early December 2022 to mid-January 2023. The report surveyed 1,750 IT operations, application development and engineering leaders from organizations with 500 or more full-time employees and who are knowledgeable about their organization's observability practice. The survey respondents were drawn from 10 countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, UK and US.

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The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...