Observability may be a core tenet of any best DevOps practice, but the number of organizations that actually engage in it is still not nearly as high as it should.
A survey of 400 software engineers published this week by Honeycomb, a provider of an observability platform, finds nearly half said they are not currently practicing observability. However, the number of organizations that expect to embrace it is growing. The Honeycomb survey finds 75% of those respondents who haven’t implemented an observability plan to do so at an advanced level within the next two years.
Conducted by ClearPath Strategies, the survey also finds that about a third of respondents are still evolving their observability capabilities. Only 10% of survey respondents exhibited what the survey describes as highly advanced capabilities.
Liz Fong-Jones, principal developer advocate for Honeycomb, there is some correlation between the number of developers an organization employs and their reliance on observability. Among organizations that have advanced observability capabilities, 42% have more than 100 developers.
In general, Fong-Jones said interest in observability is on the rise because it is becoming much easier to instrument applications. The emergence of open source agent software has made it much easier for observability platforms to collect relevant metrics that go way beyond simply monitoring an IT environment by sampling application traffic and analyzing logs, she noted. Observability platforms, in contrast, make use of technologies such as dynamic tracing to provide deeper insights into the root cause of an application issue.
That approach also ties more closely to a specific user benefit versus simply collecting metrics that don’t surface any actionable intelligence, she added.
Fong-Jones noted that observability platforms are now also playing a key role in eliminating technical debt. As organizations embrace microservices, for example, it’s becoming more challenging to identify bottlenecks and potentially redundant microservices. Observability platforms make it easier for DevOps teams to uncover these issues at a time when applications are becoming more complex, she said.
There’s no doubt reliance of observability platforms will continue to substantially increase as organizations dive deeper into best DevOps practices. Most applications deployed by most enterprise IT organizations are not that deeply instrumented. As instrumentation becomes more pervasive, IT organizations will be able to drive more value from observability platforms. That could be crucial because it’s not uncommon for IT teams to spend weeks trying to find the source of an issue that might only take a few minutes to fix.
Observability may not always be top of mind for IT teams but within the context of a best DevOps practice, it’s crucial. Many organizations are clearly racing to deploy applications without being able to observe how application code is behaving. In the absence of observability, it’s a foregone conclusion that tensions between developers and IT operations teams will rise. The challenge and the opportunity are to get everyone involved in IT on the same page in a way that ensures everyone involved is talking about the same thing at the same time.
