GEC NEWS WIRESplunk, in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), released The State of Observability 2024 report, examining observability’s role in complex IT environments and rising customer expectations. It shows that observability has become a key competitive advantage, with leaders achieving 2.6x annual ROI in operational efficiency and uptime. Benefits include faster issue resolution, enhanced developer productivity, cost control, and improved customer satisfaction, leading 86% of respondents to plan increased investments. This fourth annual report, based on a survey of 1,850 IT operations and developers, offers a comprehensive analysis of the observability industry.
The makeup of a leading observability practice
Leading observability practices don’t just happen — they’re strategically built. The report outlines a new maturity framework that consists of four stages of observability sophistication: foundational visibility; guided insights; proactive response and unified workflows. Based on this framework, respondents were placed into one of four stages of observability maturity: “Beginning” organizations (45%); “Emerging” organizations (27%); “Evolving” organizations (17%); and lastly, “Leading” organizations or “Leaders” (11%).
Leaders resolve issues quicker, reducing the impact of downtime
By adopting a leading observability practice, an organization can understand their entire digital footprint and reduce the impacts of downtime. Sixty-eight percent of leading organizations say they’re aware of application problems within minutes or seconds of an outage – 2.8 times faster than the rate of beginning organizations. Leading organizations estimate 80% of alerts are legitimate, in contrast to 54% from beginning organizations, providing greater certainty and reducing time spent on resolving false alarms. This difference in accuracy and response time is significant as customer expectations for seamless and secure digital experiences are at an all-time high. Research shows downtime can dilute customer loyalty and damage public perception.
Speed gives leading organizations an edge in software development velocity. Seventy-six percent of leaders deploy the majority of their application code on demand, in contrast to 30% of beginners. In addition, developers in leading organizations spend 38% more of their time on innovation than beginning organizations, which means having to spend less time on toilsome work like troubleshooting and triaging incidents. It’s clear that for leading organizations, increased developer productivity and output drive profitability.
“Building a leading observability practice means being obsessed with delivering incredible digital experiences to your customers, and embedding that mindset into every decision,” said Patrick Lin, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Observability at Splunk. “Our report shows this mindset pays off. Leaders not only achieve greater success in mitigating downtime, they also see greater developer innovation and speed.”
OpenTelemetry is the bedrock to a successful observability practice
OpenTelemetry, an open-source, industry-standard for collecting data, is becoming more widely adopted. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project gives organizations control over their data and alleviates vendor lock-in. The report highlights how OpenTelemetry is the foundation of an effective observability practice, with 58% saying their observability solution relies on OpenTelemetry.
- OpenTelmetry signifies innovation and resilience, with 78% of leaders embracing the open-source standard and 57% experiencing lower observability costs.
- OpenTelemetry offers unparalleled flexibility. 72% of leaders embrace OpenTelemetry to access a broader ecosystem of technologies, and 65% say the open-source project facilitates better control and ownership of data.
