Freely subscribe to our NEWSLETTER

New Relic, the observability company, published the 2022 Observability Forecast report, which captures insights into the current state of observability and its growth potential. As IT and application environments increasingly move toward complex, cloud-based microservices, 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 United Kingdom (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.

The largest study of its kind, 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. The 2022 Observability Forecast found for respondents surveyed in the UK and Ireland:
• Only 27% had achieved full-stack observability, the ability to see everything in the tech stack that could affect the customer experience (by the report’s definition). Just 2% said they had already prioritised or achieved full-stack observability by the report’s definition.
• 60% said they primarily learn about software and system interruptions with multiple monitoring tools, compared to only 15% with one observability platform.
• Furthermore, 25% said they still primarily learn about interruptions with manual checks and tests that are performed on systems at specific times or with complaints or incident tickets.
• Nearly half (49%) said they experience high-business-impact outages once per week or more, and 62% said they take more than 30 minutes to resolve those outages.
• 38% said their organisations’ telemetry data is more siloed, and 29% said the visualisation and dashboarding of that telemetry data is disparate.
• Almost half (49%) said they prefer a single, consolidated observability platform.
• Respondents predicted their organisations will most need observability for artificial intelligence (45%), IoT (44%), and 5G (30%) in the next three years.

“In the digital age, a business’ health is underpinned by its software stack, so having a full understanding of its performance is critical,” comments Gregory Ouillon, EMEA CTO of New Relic. “As the 2022 Observability Forecast demonstrates, 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.”

Achieving Full-Stack Observability

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% 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% who had not.
Next year, 62% 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% 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.

Benefits of Observability

According to the 2022 Observability Forecast, developers and engineers seek solutions that will make their lives better and easier. When New Relic and ETR asked practitioners themselves how observability helps developers and engineers the most, they found:
• 44% said it increases productivity (find and resolve issues faster).
• 41% said it makes their job easier.
• 29% said it enables cross-team collaboration.

Ambitious Deployment Plans

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 (the report focuses on 17 capabilities in all).
• Just 2% indicated that their organisations have all 17 observability capabilities deployed.
• However, by 2025, nearly all respondents surveyed in the UK and Ireland expected to deploy capabilities like network monitoring, security monitoring, and log management, as well as less common capabilities like Kubernetes monitoring, with the majority indicating they would have the 17 observability capabilities deployed.

“Observability by its very nature must look at the full stack of data available. Looking at a single layer provides only a silo view. To deliver the digital experience necessary to remain competitive, enterprises must go beyond infrastructure and make their digital business observable,” Gartner®, Innovation Insight for Observability, By Padraig Byrne and Josh Chessman, Refreshed 9 March 2022.*

Market Opportunities

As they pursue aggressive observability capability deployment plans, 44% expected to increase their observability budgets next year. These budget plans likely were influenced by the strong advocacy for observability across all groups in Ireland and the UK—including 77% of more technical-focused and 70% of less technical-focused C-suite executives. The biggest driver for observability was an increased focus on security, governance, risk, and compliance, with 60% of respondents surveyed in the UK and Ireland who said they deploy security monitoring already, and most (96%) who said they expect to deploy it by 2025.
Looking ahead, they foresee their organisations needing observability for a variety of trending technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, and Web3. C-suite executives anticipate needing observability most for the Internet of Things (IoT) (56%), AI (54%), and 5G (27%) in the next three years.