Respondents in a 10-country survey yield clues about IT observability practices and their impact on preemptive and predictive incident management

In a December 2022 to mid-January 2023 10-country survey of 1,750 IT operations, application development and engineering leaders from organizations with 500 or more full-time employees and who were knowledgeable about observability practice, a key finding among respondents that were deemed “leaders” was that instances of unplanned downtime were four times more likely to be resolved in minutes rather than hours or days.

According to the survey report, observability leaders possessed at least 24 months of experience with observability, and had achieved the highest rank in five factors: the ability to correlate data across all observability tools; the adoption of AI/ML technology within their observability toolset; skills specialization in observability; the ability to cover both cloud-native and traditional application architectures; and the adoption of AIOps.

Respondents came from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States. The key findings from respondents in India, Japan and Singapore include:

    • 48% (Japan) and 41% (Singapore) of respondents were classified as beginners, versus 1% (Japan) and 6% (Singapore) that could be classified as “leaders”
    • 25% (ANZ) and 18% (India) of respondents respectively were categorized as beginners in their respective markets
    • 57% of Singapore respondents cited challenges related to both the quantity and quality of IT operations staff (versus 41% across other countries).
    • 36% of Singapore respondents cited they were in the process of deploying AIOps solutions (versus 24% globally)

Other key findings include:

    • 33% less outages were reported by leaders per year than beginners.
    • A little over 80% of respondents cited they can find and fix problems faster with better observability. In addition, 81% claimed improved observability allowed them to “see into hybrid ecosystems”
    • 89% of leaders were completely confident in their ability to meet availability and performance requirements for their applications, 3.9x the rate of beginners
    • 165 business applications, on average, were being maintained by respondents, with about half in the public cloud and half on-premises.
    • 34% of respondents cited that AIOps capabilities included in an observability practice outperformed legacy solutions, by automatically determining the technical root cause of an issue; 31% cited that AIOps helped them to predict problems and stop them from becoming customer-impacting incidents; 30% cited AIOps in observability useful for improving assessment of the severity of an incident
    • Observability leaders were cited as “collaborating more with line-of-business leaders on resilience strategies, which includes investing in solutions that recover customer services faster and remediate incidents more efficiently”

According to Spiros Xanthos, SVP and General Manager (Observability), Splunk, which commissioned the survey: enhancing “observability enables businesses to keep their software and infrastructure reliable, systems secure and customers happy.”