Report: Only 27% of organizations have observability across their entire stack

New Relic’s 2022 Observability Forecast is the industry’s largest survey of IT professionals and decision-makers to understand the current state of observability. Their definition of observability is the ability to measure how a system is performing and to identify problems and errors based on its external output.

The Observability Forecast for 2022 provides a detailed picture of how this practice is shaping the engineering and technologies of the future. Of those who had mature observational practices, 100% indicated that observability improves revenue retention by deepening their understanding of customer behavior compared to the 34% whose practices were less mature.

Based on the report’s definition of full-stack observability, only 27% of respondents’ organizations achieved this. And an even smaller percentage — 3% — said their organization has already prioritized full-stack observation. Full-stack observability, as used in this report, is achieved by organizations deploying specific combinations of observation capabilities, including customer experience/DEM monitoring (front-end), services monitoring, log management, and environment monitoring (back-end).

Visibility and dropout

The data supports a strong correlation between achieving or prioritizing full-stack observability and experiencing less dropouts, improved dropout detection rates, and improved resolution. For example, 34% of respondents who said they had already prioritized or achieved full-stack observability were also less likely to experience the most frequent high-impact outages (once a week or more), compared to the 52% who had done so. not.

In addition, 68% of respondents who said they had already prioritized or achieved full-stack observability also said it takes less than 30 minutes to detect high-impact outages, compared to 44% who did. hadn’t done.

The ideal

The research implies that the ideal state of observability is one where engineering teams monitor the entire tech stack at all stages of the software development lifecycle, use mature observational practice features, and have unified telemetry data and a unified dashboard or visualization of that data — ideally in a single , consolidated platform. Nearly half of all respondents (47%) said they prefer a single, consolidated platform, but only 2% said they use one tool for observation.

More than half (52%) of respondents, including 57% of C-suite executives, expected observability budgets to increase in the coming year.

Respondents foresee that their organizations need observability for a variety of trending technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), 5G and Web3. Looking to 2025, the report estimates that almost everyone expects to implement observational capabilities such as network monitoring, security monitoring, log management, and more.

The report is also notable in that the raw data is open and available for public download.

Methodology

For the 2022 Observability Forecast, New Relic surveyed 1,614 IT professionals in 14 countries in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific between March and April 2022.

Read the full report of New Relic.