Research Objectives
The need for observability in IT operations management is driven by the desire for organizations to reduce downtime, increase operational security, and improve customer, digital, and employee experiences. This is important because software, in many cases, contributes directly to an organization’s bottom line. In IT operations management, the addition of distributed and multi-cloud, cloud-native development and architectures as well as the increasing importance of security mean that the infrastructure is much more complex and significantly more dynamic. For software developers and DevOps teams, understanding the behavior of their code in production and integrated development environments empowers them to troubleshoot and deliver better-performing code and applications in less time. Against this backdrop, IT and DevOps teams are embracing observability and, to a lesser extent, AIOps to help them instrument and monitor their infrastructure and applications.
To determine the current state of observability and AIOps in modern organizations, Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 374 IT and DevOps/AppDev professionals in North America (US and Canada) responsible for evaluating, purchasing, building, and managing application infrastructure in their organization.
This study sought to answer the following questions:
- What percentage of organizations are using full-stack observability today? How many plan to implement?
- To what extent are organizations deploying observability across their environments?
- How many observability tools do organizations use to collect data from their environments?
- To what extent is observability tool sprawl adding complexity to environments?
- What third-party observability or monitoring tools are in use? Which are most valued by organizations?
- What are the most important organizational priorities for observability?
- What are the most impactful benefits delivered by observability and monitoring strategies?
- What are the biggest challenges or concerns when it comes to deploying observability solutions?
- What are the biggest challenges or concerns in using and supporting observability solutions?
- How are organizations planning to address challenges relating to observability data growth?
- What do organizations consider to be the most important observability tools currently in use?
- Which teams are making the final decisions around which observability tools are used?
- How confident are teams in the observability tools they are using across all stages of the application lifecycle (e.g., build, release, and operate)?
- What are the plans to invest in additional tools and services to support monitoring and observability strategies? Which tools or services are organizations targeting?
- What is the current and future adoption landscape for AIOps?
- Among organizations using AIOps, what benefits are delivered and how impactful are they?
- How important is AIOps in terms of overall observability strategies and future related plans?
- What are the barriers to AIOps adoption?
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.
