New Relic has released its 2025 Observability Forecast, surveying over 1,700 IT and engineering leaders and team members across 23 countries and 11 industries. The report highlights key focus areas, challenges, and trends influencing observability investments like the growing adoption of enterprise AI. The data showed that the cost of any digital business downtime is profound—with high-impact outages carrying a median cost of $2 million USD per hour globally, or approximately $33,333 for every minute systems remain down. For Australia and New Zealand specifically, the hourly cost of high-impact IT outages for nearly a third of organisations sits between $1-3 million USD per hour.
Organisations across Australia and New Zealand saw massive growth year-over-year in the deployment of key observability capabilities, with nearly 2x growth in database monitoring and alerting usage. These organisations also report the lowest amount of engineering time spent on disruptions globally: the median time spent was 20%—a figure significantly lower than the Asia Pacific average (31%), and also below EMEA (26%) and the Americas (25%).
Observability practices are maturing, but challenges persist
Australian and New Zealand respondents signalled impressive growth year-over-year in the deployment of key observability capabilities including: Database monitoring (up from 38% in 2024 to 74% in 2025); Alerts (up from 41% in 2024 to 73% in 2025); and Dashboards (up from 35% in 2024 to 70% in 2025). These figures, which are almost double the year prior, point to a rapid and significant maturing of observability infrastructure. While deployment of key capabilities are increasing, tool sprawl and fragmentation are continuing to present significant hurdles. 35% of respondents in ANZ still use five or more observability tools, with only 5% relying on a single platform. While this represents a meaningful shift from 2024 when 57% reported using five or more tools, tool sprawl is continuing to present a challenge for over a third of organisations.
Outages are expensive and distract engineers from innovating
A quarter of Australian and New Zealand organisations (25%) experience high-business-impact outages at least weekly, with 2% facing them multiple times per day. For nearly a third of these cases, the cost can be between $1-3 million per hour in lost revenue—and alarmingly, 10% of organisations aren’t tracking the financial impact at all. These outages are also time consuming with 21% of high-impact outages taking between 30-60 minutes to detect (MTTD), and almost a quarter (23%) take a further 30-60 minutes to resolve (MTTR). For organisations experiencing these outages weekly, the annual cost can be significant.
Observability delivers ROI and key operational benefits
Organisations in Australia and New Zealand are seeing consistently positive returns on their observability investments, with 32% reporting a 2–3x ROI. They are also rapidly adopting visibility tools to reduce downtime and improve system health. The use of dashboards to report performance and health KPIs has nearly doubled, from 24% in 2024 to 47% in 2025. Strategic priorities continue to shape investments, with security, governance, and compliance cited as key drivers by 35% of respondents. AI adoption follows closely at 32%, with customer experience and cost management each noted by 26%.
“While organisations across Australia and New Zealand are leaps and bounds ahead of their Asia-Pacific peers in terms of observability maturity, tool sprawl and fragmentation remain significant hurdles and are contributing to costly outages costs,” said New Relic Senior Vice President and General Manager Asia Pacific, Rob Newell. “To stay ahead of the curve, businesses across Australia and New Zealand need to prioritise reducing tool sprawl and data siloes so engineers can detect and resolve critical issues fast. With high-business impact outages costing up to $3 million per hour in lost revenue, organisations can no longer ignore the costs associated with maintaining the status quo.”
Other key findings from the report include:
- Strategic priorities continue to shape investments. Security, governance, and compliance were cited as key drivers of observability adoption by over a third (35%) of respondents. AI adoption follows closely at 32%, with customer experience and cost management each noted by 26%.
- Executives and practitioners recognise impactful benefits of observability.
Observability is getting recognition by senior management with over half (53%) of executives stating that observability helps them achieve business KPIs—up sharply from 38% in previous years. The benefits from practitioners are also notable with 45% reporting increased productivity due to faster issue resolution. - Businesses are taking steps to consolidate observability tools. The data shows a 27% decrease in the average number of observability tools per organisation globally from 2023 to 2025. 48% of respondents state that their organisations plan to consolidate their observability tooling within the next year—a notable increase from 31% in 2024. Preference for a single, unified platform is also on the rise, with 40% favoring this approach overall, and as many as 46% in New Zealand.
You can read the full report here.
