New Relic, the observability company, has unveiled its 2022 Observability Forecast report, which highlights insights into the current state of observability and its growth potential. The research found technology professionals have bold plans to ramp up observability capabilities to get ahead of issues that could impact customer experience and application security.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents said C-suite executives in their organisation are advocates of observability, and more than three-quarters of respondents surveyed in the UK and Ireland (71%) saw observability as a key enabler for achieving core business goals, which implies that observability has become a board-level imperative.
Gregory Ouillon, EMEA CTO of New Relic said, “in the digital age, a business’ health is underpinned by its software stack, so having a full understanding of its performance is critical. the 2022 Observability Forecast demonstrates, that achieving full-stack observability is a top priority in enabling IT teams to improve uptime, customer experience, and efficient and reliable operational services, which gives businesses the insurance they need to achieve important core business goals.”
The second annual Observability Forecast from New Relic and Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) had 1,614 respondents, including 1,044 (65%) practitioners, day-to-day users of observability tools, and 570 (35%) IT decision-makers, across 14 countries to understand their current use of observability tools and approaches, as well as their perspectives on the future of observability. The report also reveals the technologies they believe will drive further need for observability.
According to the research, organisations today monitor their technology stacks with a patchwork of tools. At the same time, respondents seemed to long for simplicity, integration, seamlessness, and more efficient ways to complete high-value projects. Moreover, as organisations race to embrace technologies like blockchain, edge computing, and 5G to deliver optimal customer experiences, observability supports more manageable deployment to help drive innovation, uptime, and reliability.
Among the report’s key takeaways, the data supports a strong correlation between achieving/prioritising full-stack observability and experiencing fewer outages, improved outage detection rates, and improved resolution. For example, 61 per cent who had already achieved full-stack observability by the report’s definition were also more likely to experience the least frequent high-business-impact outages (once per month or fewer), compared to the 28 per cent who had not.
Next year, 62 per cent said they expect to deploy five or more additional observability capabilities, including distributed tracing (42%), AIOps (40%), and ML model performance monitoring (37%).
The research implies that the ideal state of observability is one where engineering teams monitor the entire tech stack in all stages of the software development lifecycle, employ mature observability practice characteristics, and have unified telemetry data and a unified dashboard or visualisation of that data — ideally in a single, consolidated platform. Nearly half of all respondents (49%) said they prefer a single, consolidated observability platform, yet just 2 per cent said they use one tool for observability.
Respondents surveyed in the UK and Ireland said some of the main challenges preventing them from achieving full-stack observability are a lack of understanding of the benefits, lack of budget, too many monitoring tools, and a disparate tech stack.
When asked about the top trends driving observability needs at their organisations, respondents said risk mitigation, cloud-native application architectures, customer experience, and migration to a multi-cloud environment were among the highest drivers. Challenges aside, respondents see observability’s bottom-line benefits and expect to deploy additional observability capabilities, including AIOps, alerts, and serverless monitoring, in the next three years.