A New Relic survey of more than 1,300 software engineers, developers and IT leaders globally, has uncovered while 92% of ANZ respondents believe observability is important and strategic to their business—and 52% believe it to be very important and strategic to their role—just 25% noted mature observability practices within their business. Recognising the importance of closing that gap, 82% of survey respondents expect to increase their observability budget in the coming year with 15% expecting budgets to increase significantly.
“IT teams are under an unprecedented amount of pressure to ensure that they keep up with the pace of innovation demanded by customers. This means shipping new features fast, while ensuring downtime is kept to a minimum,” noted Ben Goodman, SVP of New Relic Asia Pacific and Japan. “Modern observability empowers software engineers, developers and decision makers with the information they need to make swift, data-driven decisions, and is a non-negotiable for enterprises looking to deliver great digital experiences that keep their customers coming back.”
During the pandemic, most organisations accelerated their digital transformation initiatives by as much as three or four years. This phenomenon has condensed software development cycles and burdened data pipelines, making both increasingly complex for engineers and developers with multiple stages of telemetry ingest, processing and compounded interdependencies between various systems of record, applications, infrastructure and networks.
Yet despite the promises and because digital experiences are built on thousands of microservices, today’s monitoring tools often require engineers to spend an unreasonable amount of time stitching together siloed data and switching context between a patchwork of insufficient analysis tools for different parts of the tech stack—only to discover blindspots because it’s too cumbersome and too expensive to instrument the full estate. And even then, engineers get stuck at what is happening, instead of being able to focus on why it’s happening. In fact, 87% of ANZ survey respondents noted having to toggle between two to ten different tools to monitor the health of their systems.
This all comes at significant cost to businesses—in shipping delays, slow responses to outages, poor customer experiences and time wasted that engineers could have spent on the higher priority, business-impacting and creative coding they love.
Consolidating tools into a single, unified observability platform is among the research report’s five key insights for charting an organisation’s path to achieving modern observability. Adopting a data-driven approach for end-to-end observability, expanding observability across the entire software ecosystem, modernising the IT budget for full-stack observability and upleveling the value of observability to further engage the C-Suite round out the list.
“Modern observability is the domain of engineers and business leaders alike, because of its ability to make crucial data easily accessible, understandable and actionable. By taking a data-driven approach and creating a clear line of sight across the tech stack, modern observability is able to improve uptime and reliability while creating best of breed customer experiences,” noted Goodman.
Key ANZ findings from the 2021 Observability Forecast include:
Observability is mission critical
- 91% of respondents believe observability is important and strategic to their business
- 52% believe observability to be very important and strategic to their role
- 82% of respondents expect to increase their observability budget in the next year with 15% expecting budgets to increase significantly
Observability delivers clear, positive business impact
- 90% of IT decision makers (ITDMs) see observability as critical at every stage of the software lifecycle with especially high importance in planning and operations
- 44% believe observability helps support their digital transformation with 20% noting it helps deliver better digital experiences for end users
- 35% cite faster deployment with observability
- 17% believe observability helps the organisation be more cost effective
Massive opportunity to expand and mature observability practices
Survey respondents confirmed that outages are on the rise, and that monitoring is fragmented
- Unsurprisingly, 87% noted having to toggle between at least two and 24% between ten different tools to monitor the health of their systems
- 6% of respondents said that they cannot gain end-to-end observability at all
- 75% of respondents note room to grow their observability practice with only 25% claiming a mature observability practice in their business
Organisations lack a strategy or roadmap for implementation
- Only 56% of respondents note their organisations are in the process of implementing observability
- Not enough of their systems are instrumented (42%), and the lack of resources (42%) and understanding of the benefits (39%) are top barriers to success
- This explains why 62% of respondents still monitor telemetry data at the application level, leaving massive data unmonitored in their software stack
Observability for Kubernetes and containers expected to grow rapidly
- While the majority of IT decision makers (96%) are exploring Kubernetes and containers at some level right now, 29% are conducting research, 37% are evaluating, 25% are in development and just 5% are in production
- There is hope amongst IT decision makers that this will change as 42% expect to be in production within three years
- This is critical because achieving true observability hinges on deploying solutions across all data that will automatically collect and correlate observability data from any and all available sources
