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The Greatest Benefit of Observability: Prioritizing and Resolving Issues Faster

The need for real-time, reliable data is increasing, and that data is a necessity to remain competitive in today's business landscape. At the same time, observability has become even more critical with the complexity of a hybrid multi-cloud environment.

"In today's complex hybrid multi-cloud environment, CIOs understand that monitoring of logs, metrics, and traces is no longer sufficient," said Will Schoeppner, Research Director covering application performance management and business intelligence at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), and author of the a new research report, Driving Observability Through Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics. "Organizations require an observability solution that will provide crucial visibility into the health and performance of the environment and enable predictive solutioning and remediation of critical events prior to impacting customer performance."

To add to the challenges and complexity, the term "observability" has not been clearly defined and can be broad in context. Across the industry, a commonality is that the reach of observability extends well beyond simply the collection of logs, metrics, and traces. Unified observability brings infrastructure monitoring, security, logs, application performance monitoring, and SaaS monitoring into a single platform for complete end-to-end visibility for cross-functional teams, driving streamlined collaboration and faster resolution of issues. Based on this definition, EMA's research explores challenges technology teams face in a complex landscape and how the benefits of observability can have an impact on driving business outcomes and customer success.

This study explored the rapid growth of observability and its critical importance in an organization. It also evaluated how observability that provides predictive analytics developed using machine learning models can make the difference in delivering customer expectations, reducing technology resource cost, and eliminating fatigue within an organization's technology teams.

The research delivered several fascinating key findings detailed throughout the report. Some of these key findings are:

■ 73% of companies indicated they have been data-driven in their decision-making process for three years or more.

■ Only 27% of organizations use the same solution for observability across all IT software development functions.

■ 71% of companies indicated they have been mature in the use of analytics and the use of machine learning in observability for three years or more. However, only 54% of organizations believe their maturity in analytics and the use of machine learning in observability is advanced or superior.

According to respondents, the greatest benefit of observability is being able to prioritize and resolve issues faster, followed by being able to proactively detect issues.

The EMA report was sponsored by Elastic.

The Latest

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 ...

The Greatest Benefit of Observability: Prioritizing and Resolving Issues Faster

The need for real-time, reliable data is increasing, and that data is a necessity to remain competitive in today's business landscape. At the same time, observability has become even more critical with the complexity of a hybrid multi-cloud environment.

"In today's complex hybrid multi-cloud environment, CIOs understand that monitoring of logs, metrics, and traces is no longer sufficient," said Will Schoeppner, Research Director covering application performance management and business intelligence at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), and author of the a new research report, Driving Observability Through Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics. "Organizations require an observability solution that will provide crucial visibility into the health and performance of the environment and enable predictive solutioning and remediation of critical events prior to impacting customer performance."

To add to the challenges and complexity, the term "observability" has not been clearly defined and can be broad in context. Across the industry, a commonality is that the reach of observability extends well beyond simply the collection of logs, metrics, and traces. Unified observability brings infrastructure monitoring, security, logs, application performance monitoring, and SaaS monitoring into a single platform for complete end-to-end visibility for cross-functional teams, driving streamlined collaboration and faster resolution of issues. Based on this definition, EMA's research explores challenges technology teams face in a complex landscape and how the benefits of observability can have an impact on driving business outcomes and customer success.

This study explored the rapid growth of observability and its critical importance in an organization. It also evaluated how observability that provides predictive analytics developed using machine learning models can make the difference in delivering customer expectations, reducing technology resource cost, and eliminating fatigue within an organization's technology teams.

The research delivered several fascinating key findings detailed throughout the report. Some of these key findings are:

■ 73% of companies indicated they have been data-driven in their decision-making process for three years or more.

■ Only 27% of organizations use the same solution for observability across all IT software development functions.

■ 71% of companies indicated they have been mature in the use of analytics and the use of machine learning in observability for three years or more. However, only 54% of organizations believe their maturity in analytics and the use of machine learning in observability is advanced or superior.

According to respondents, the greatest benefit of observability is being able to prioritize and resolve issues faster, followed by being able to proactively detect issues.

The EMA report was sponsored by Elastic.

The Latest

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 ...