Digital Enterprise Journal (DEJ) surveyed and interviewed more than 1,300 organizations to discover best practices for adopting Observability strategies and technology solutions. This research will be published in DEJ’s upcoming study titled “Strategies of Leading Organizations in Adopting Observability” and this Analyst Note summarizes some of the key findings.
The study is leveraging DEJ’s Maturity Framework to identify a class of top performing organizations (TPOs – top 20 of research participants based on their performance) and analyze their strategies and technology capabilities they are deploying. Before we delved into capabilities that these leading organizations are leveraging and that are having the strongest impact on performance, we wanted to answer a few questions that are providing a context for the rest of the study.
Why is Observability such a hot topic?
Sixty-four percent of organizations have deployed, or are looking to deploy Observability capabilities. This ranks Observability as one of the top management concepts in the IT space. There are several reasons why that is the case, but from analyzing the survey data it comes down to five key areas:
Loss of visibility – 58% or organizations reported that they lost visibility into the digital service delivery chain after conducting modernization projects (cloud migration, deploying microservices, adopting a cloud native approach, new software delivery approaches, etc.). For these organizations, adopting Observability is a way to replace monitoring solutions that are no longer effective.
Business impact – 52% of Observability deployments are driven by the need to achieve specific business outcomes. DEJ’s recent study on the state of IT performance in 2022 showed that the impact on business outcomes is not only the #1 selection criteria, but it also grew in importance by 32% over the last 12 months.
Better solution for persistent challenges – It is perceived as a more effective approach for addressing the same challenges that organizations have been struggling with for years. The study shows that some of the key challenges that organizations are looking to address by deploying Observability are: 1) inability to proactively prevent performance issues; 2) reduce time spent on troubleshooting performance incidents; 3) lack of actionable context for monitoring data, etc. These are the same challenges that were on the top of user organizations lists (in both IT Operations and DevOps research) over the last 3-4 years.
As a term, Observability describes an outcome, not a tool, which resonates better with user organizations.
Do people have a clear understanding of what Observability is?
No. Forty-eight percent of organizations reported that market confusion and an inability to differentiate Observability solutions as the key obstacle for deployment. Additionally, the top two definitions of Observability that were selected in the survey were: 1) MELT (metrics, events, logs and traces) based approach to visibility; and 2) new approach to monitoring in complex dynamic environments. However, DEJ’s analysis of practices of TPOs showed:
There is no significant difference between TPOs and all others when it comes to having all 4 elements of MELT (same goes for 3 “key pillars” – logs, metrics and traces). Therefore, having each of the MELT elements is not a requirement for top performance in adopting Observability.
Many of the solutions that TPOs are deploying are not defined by strong monitoring capabilities. Effective monitoring of dynamic complex requirements is very important for addressing key challenges, but the study shows that having true Observability requires capabilities that go way beyond monitoring.
How did we get here?
The study shows that we are witnessing a perfect storm of technology and business trends that are driving organizations to redefine their approaches regarding how they think about using technology, managing it and where it fits in their business strategies.
Adopting true Observability addresses each of these market pressures and the study shows that TPOs identified the right mix of capabilities that enables them to turn these dynamics into opportunities and an advantage.
So what really defines Observability?
The best way to define any novel technology concept is to simply ask user organizations that are looking to deploy it what it really means to them. The study identified 5 key areas where organizations see the true value of Observability solutions.
