Organizations upbeat on Software Observability, likely to loosen their purse strings further

Organizations are likely to increase their software observability budget in the next year, indicated a survey commissioned by the observability company, New Relic among software engineers, developers, and IT leaders globally.

The accelerated pace of digital transformation initiatives during the pandemic has left the IT teams vexed in most of the organizations. Not only did it speed up the software development cycles, it also burdened data pipelines and made it 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.

Monitoring is fragmented too, as 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 blind spots 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 India, 84% of survey respondents admitted that they toggle between at least two different tools to monitor the health of their systems, while for 23% of respondents, this sat at 10 or more different tools.

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. “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,” said Ben Goodman, SVP of New Relic Asia Pacific and Japan.

Consolidating tools into a single, unified observability platform can help in this scenario. “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," he explained.

Here are some key findings from the global survey highlighting the benefits of observability:

Image Source: New Relic

In India, 95% of IT decision makers (ITDMs) see observability as critical at every stage of the software lifecycle with especially high importance in planning and operations. 61% believe observability helps support their digital transformation with 24% noting it helps deliver better digital experiences for end users. 33% cite faster deployment with observability. 14% believe observability helps the organization be more cost-effective.

Observability budgets are likely to rise as a top priority 

New Relic's 2021 Observability Forecast highlights the finding that 89% of respondents expect to increase their observability budget in the next year with 51% expecting budgets to increase significantly.

While the majority of ITDMs (99%) are exploring Kubernetes and containers at some level right now, 33% are conducting research, 18% are evaluating, 37% are in development and just 11% are in production. There is hope amongst ITDMs that this will change as 27% 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.

Organizations lack a strategy or roadmap for observability implementation

Although 94% of respondents believe observability is important and strategic to their business, only 51% of respondents note their organizations are in the process of implementing observability. Interestingly, 75% believe it to be very important and strategic to their role which is also the highest globally.

However, despite that 8% of respondents said that they cannot gain end-to-end observability at all. 64% of respondents noted room to grow their observability practice with only 36% claiming a mature observability practice in their business.

Too many monitoring tools (38%) and a lack of strategy (38%), understanding of the benefits (31%) and resources (23%) are top barriers to success, reveals the survey. This  explains why 65% of respondents still monitor telemetry data at the application level, leaving massive data unmonitored in their software stack.