A New Relic survey found only 27% of respondents have achieved full-stack observability with only 5% claiming they have a mature observability practice in place. A third (33%) of respondents also said they still primarily detect outages manually or based on complaints, the survey found.
The global survey polled 1,614 respondents, including 1,044 practitioners and 570 IT decision-makers and was published today by New Relic.
On the plus side, the survey also found nearly three-quarters of respondents said C-suite executives in their organization are advocates of observability, and more than three-quarters of respondents (78%) saw observability as a key enabler for achieving core business goals.
However, more than half (52%) of respondents said they experienced high-business-impact outages once per week or more and 29% said they take more than an hour to resolve those outages.
Peter Pezaris, senior vice president for strategy and user experience at New Relic, said a big reason it takes so long to resolve issues is the time required to determine the root cause of issues using multiple tools. A full 82% of respondents said they use four or more tools to monitor the health of their systems. Only 7% said their telemetry data is entirely unified and only 13% said the visualization or dashboarding of that data is entirely unified. Nearly half of respondents (47%) said they would prefer to have a single, consolidated observability platform, but only 2% said they currently used one tool for observability.
New Relic, of course, is making a case for a single observability platform that spans both the application environment and the underlying infrastructure an application depends on. Today, most IT teams are using a wide range of tools to monitor infrastructure and applications.
Nearly all respondents said by 2025 they expect to deploy capabilities like network monitoring, security monitoring and log management, as well as Kubernetes monitoring. More than a third (36%) believe observability increases their productivity and enables them to find and resolve issues faster. Just under a third (32%) said observability enables cross-team collaboration, while more than a quarter said observability improves their ability to innovate.
Nearly three-quarters (72%) expected to maintain or increase their observability budgets next year. More than half (52%) of respondents, including 57% of C-suite executives, expected observability budgets to increase over the next year. A total of 14% of all respondents and 16% of IT decision-makers expected to increase observability budgets significantly or extensively. IT decision-makers anticipate needing observability most for artificial intelligence (51%), internet of things (48%), edge computing (38%) and blockchain (36%) in the next three years.
It’s still early days as far as the adoption of observability platforms is concerned, but it’s apparent that as application environments become more complex the plethora of monitoring tools that DevOps teams rely on will need to be streamlined. Observability platforms promise to unify logs, metrics and traces in a way that makes it simpler to launch queries to identify the root cause of an issue.
The rate at which DevOps teams will embrace observability will naturally vary, but the biggest obstacle might not be the platforms themselves. Instead, the issue is understanding what queries can help DevOps teams better understand the root cause of an IT issue before there is a major disruption. In the long term, it’s expected that machine learning algorithms will leverage the data collected by observability platforms to automatically identify issues that might lead to a disruption long before it actually occurs.
In the meantime, the hope is that monitoring tools will give way to observability platforms that will make managing complex IT environments much simpler for all concerned.
