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Lessons From Observability Leaders
Uncover learnings from enterprises who have adopted observability
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Introduction Eliminating outages Service delivery Early days Business outcomes IT outcomes
Introduction
IT environments are becoming too complex for humans to manage alone. Observability tools have emerged as a solution for teams facing shortened development cycles and increased focus on performance and security.

We commissioned the survey—2023 IT Trends: Lessons From Observability Leaders—to understand how leaders are adopting observability and what they are learning. We invite you to explore the key findings.
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KEY FINDINGS
Eliminating outages
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Eliminating outages through observability

Outages or brownouts in an enterprise’s network are not just disruptions but indicators of deficiencies in the enterprise’s observability’s efforts. Our survey found the typical enterprise suffers:

Get in front of outages
A robust observability strategy can help preemptively detect anomalies and potential issues—before they escalate into full flown outages.
KEY FINDINGS
Digital services
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It’s all about end-to-end digital services

When it comes to end-to-end digital service delivery, respondents noted these crucial priorities for their business and customers:

  • Security
    100%
  • Customer experience
    99%
  • Performance
    94%
  • Privacy and data sovereignty
    86%
What matters most
Modern enterprises revolve around being reliable, effective, and frictionless—especially in providing end-to-end digital services.
KEY FINDINGS
Early days
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Observability adoption: still in the early days

Key Finding 1
Key Finding 2
Key Finding 3

Organizations’ most important observability goals:

  • Improving customer experience
    96%
  • Faster innovation
    71%
  • Reducing the average time to solve issues
    71%
  • Reducing the average time to detect issues
    60%

While 100% of respondents are engaging with observability in some form, only 1% say they actually leverage observability.

Key challenges with fully adopting observability:

  • Accelerating pace of change
    72%
  • Observability blind spots
    58%
  • Growing complexity
    58%
  • Insufficient budgets
    52%

The challenges enterprises face in implementing observability aren’t just technical. More than half of respondents reported poor retention of IT observability staff due to burnout.

  • Poor retention of IT staff due to burnout
    51%
Overnight adoption isn’t an option for most
Most respondents say they are still in the early stages of observability.
KEY FINDINGS
Better business outcomes
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Observability leads to better business outcomes

Key Finding 1
Key Finding 2
Key Finding 3

We were curious as to what observability leaders are doing better than most. The survey found leaders are doing better than the laggards with these business outcomes:

Observability leaders are more integrated and are increasingly trading tool sprawl for a comprehensive, single-pane-of-glass visibility.

  • 3X Revenue growth
  • 3X Revenue growth
  • 2.5X Speed of innovation
  • 7.5X Better at auto-remediating
Observability leaders are 3.9X more likely to say they are doing extremely well with employee experience and gave higher ratings to their staff’s observability skills and lower levels of burnout.
  • Observability leaders who state their staff is extremely skilled at observability.
    13%
  • Observability laggards who state their staff is extremely skilled at observability.
    2%
Defining Observability leaders and laggards
To determine a leader or laggard in the survey, points were assigned to each question related to good or bad outcomes. Respondents with scores in the top third are classified as observability leaders. Respondents with scores in the bottom third are classified as observability laggards.
KEY FINDINGS
Better IT outcomes
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Observability leads to better IT outcomes

The report found observability leaders lead the laggards by huge margins in monitoring, detecting, and resolving issues. Leaders say their organizations are doing 2X better with:

Improving efficiency and customer retention
Observability can accelerate insights, improve data integrity and resilience, implement automation, and reduce human error.

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The SolarWinds IT Trends Report is an annual survey that explores significant trends, developments, and movements related to—and directly affecting—technology professionals and leaders.

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