Gleaning from 800 respondents representing the Asia Pacific region, one survey report shows some key factors behind such investments

Based on a Apr/May 2024 survey of 1,700 technology professionals in 16 countries* on observability investments, some ASEAN^ trends have been publicized by a firm running an observability platform.

First, the median outage cost cited by respondents for high-business-impact outages in ASEAN was US$2.5m per hour, compared to a median cost of US$1.9m per hour. Engineering teams in the survey cited spending an average of 30% of their time addressing disruptions, which is equivalent to 12 hours across a 40-hour work week. The most common causes of their unplanned outages over the last two years were network failure (35%), third-party or cloud provider services failure (29%), and human error (28%).

Second, 27% of respondents in the ASEAN cities surveyed cited learning about outages with multiple monitoring tools, and 22% did this through manual checks, tests, or operator complaints. Some 18% learned about outages through an observability platform.

Other findings

Third, among the regional respondents, the adoption of AI technologies (38%) was cited as the key driver of investing in observability, followed by the integration of business apps, and migrating to a multi-cloud environment (both 34%). Security monitoring was the most deployed capability in the region (55%), followed by infrastructure monitoring (54%). At the global respondents level, security monitoring was the most deployed capability (58%), while AI-related capabilities deployed included AI monitoring (42%), machine learning model monitoring (29%), and AIOps (24%). Also:

  • 39% of global respondents cited being expected to deploy AI for IT operations (AIOps) capabilities in the next 12 months, followed by AI monitoring (36%), and machine learning (ML) model monitoring (34%).
  • 20% of ASEAN respondents indicated they had achieved full-stack observability, with the highest rate being 40% from those in Indonesia. Similarly, 65% in Indonesia had deployed 10 or more capabilities. Some 20% of Singapore respondents had reached that level of adoption.
  • Across all regional respondents, a complex tech stack (36%) and lack of budget (30%) were cited the top challenges preventing full-stack observability.
  • 80% of respondents representing ASEAN indicated that observability delivered a substantial return on investment (ROI), when US$1m or more was spent on this per year. In terms of ROI, Malaysia respondents cited a median annual ROI of 302%, the highest among ASEAN countries and second-highest in the Asia Pacific region. Thailand respondents cited a median annual ROI of 300%, while those in Singapore cited achieving 258%.
  • 49% of ASEAN respondents cited using five or more tools for observability, compared to 45% overall. Some 14% indicated they were using only one tool; 63% preferred a single, consolidated platform, while 18% preferred multiple point solutions.
  • 75% of regional respondents cited taking at least 30 minutes to detect outages; 72% cited taking at least 30 minutes to resolve them. When it came to high-business-impact outages, 78% of those impacted said it cost them at least US$1m per hour.
  • 40% of global respondents who were IT professionals cited correlating business outcomes with telemetry data (business observability) as a top priority. Some 47% indicated planning to deploy it within the next three years. Those that had indicated implementing business observability experienced 40% less annual downtime, spent 24% less on hourly annual outage costs, and spent 25% less time addressing disruptions compared to those that had yet to implement observability solutions.

According to Peter Marelas, Field Chief Technology Officer (APJ), New Relic, the firm that commissioned the survey, the tangible business benefits that observability delivers “include less downtime, fewer critical outages, and high ROI.”

*across the Americas (35%), the Asia Pacific region (44% of respondents), and Europe (21%), comprising IT developers and engineers (65%) and IT C-suite executives and non-executive managers (35%). More than half of survey respondents (57%) worked for large organizations, followed by 34% for midsize organizations, and 9% for small organizations. Less than a quarter (17%) cited US$500,000 to US$9.99m, 26% cited US$10m to US$99.99m, and 57% cited US$100m or more in annual revenue.

^ASEAN respondents (10 countries of South-east Asia) form a subset of the 800 respondents representing APAC in this survey