The complexity and scale of today’s digital architectures, combined with the accelerated pace of innovation and software development, increase the risks to system availability, reliability and performance.
One out of two companies in France plans to increase its investments in observability in order to consolidate its tools and obtain a unified real-time view of its architecture, according to the “Observability Forecast 2022” study, carried out by Enterprise Technology Research and commissioned by New Relic in September 2022.
They thus aim to gain in resilience and performance, but above all to improve the customer experience and increase innovation.
Understand the causes to eliminate incidents more quickly
Whether you serve millions of customers or thousands of businesses worldwide, human error is the cause of 49% of IT failures. Most often, it occurs during routine and essential operations: setting up new versions of software, updating intermediate software, modifying the infrastructure, improving security.
The other most frequent category of failure occurs during traffic peaks. It often reveals undersizing and saturation issues in the architecture, or design limitations that compromise scalability. These defects then generate a degradation of performance and a collapse of the system.
By providing a fully connected view of all software telemetry data from one place, observability helps identify issues before they impact services, customers, and the business. According to the “Observability Forecast” study, only 56% of organizations that have already implemented full stack observability experience low business impact outages once a week or more, compared to 76.1% for those that have not implemented full observability.
A rise in developer agility and velocity
In a post-Covid world, where more than 50% of global economic activity is carried out through digital channels, companies must be reactive. Developers need to be able to go from idea to realization, including deploying code, faster and faster and more frequently.
By using a DevOps approach and a micro-services architecture, the developer is able to deploy new releases on demand, much more often. Moreover, with observability, he can instantly validate that these behave as he expects and, in the event of a problem, revert to the previous version to correct the bugs.
Instead of spending 40% of his time resolving incidents in production, he has more latitude to improve the resilience and scalability of his stack. It innovates more, for example by developing more features for customers and product teams. Also according to the “Observability Forecast” study, companies that have acquired a maturity in their observability practice are significantly more likely to use full observability (full stack observability) in all stages of the software development cycle (53 % for planning, 46% for building, 51% for deploying and 54% for operating) than the others.
Business benefits and a better customer experience
In recent years, companies have realized that if observability is used to ensure an optimal foundation – availability, reliability, performance – it also makes it possible to achieve direct economic challenges of effectiveness and efficiency such as increased productivity and lower unit costs.
As IT teams better understand what resources they need to deliver better performance, infrastructure costs are optimized. Developers also have more time to understand and take ownership of the customer and user experience of their software architecture. They are thus much better equipped to optimize the growth of the company by improving the conversion rate, the customer experience and the satisfaction of the latter.
The Observability Forecast shows that for about a third of professionals surveyed, observability brings concrete business benefits: availability, performance and reliability (35.6%), operational efficiency (34.6%), customer experience (33.1 %), innovation, business and/or revenue growth (25.6%).
CEOs who increasingly invest in observability
Businesses are moving from the era of monitoring, which consists of reactively resolving incidents, to the era of observability and proactive real-time performance management. Decision makers have understood that the digital challenge is not only to manage and solve problems? But above all to increase business performance. To do this, CIOs and CTOs know that they must consolidate their ecosystem of tools gradually, but effectively, in order to simplify it and move towards full stack observability.
However, if the study shows that 78% of them recognize that this full stack observability will allow them to achieve all of their business objectives, agility, efficiency, customer experience, reliability in real time, only 27% of respondents believe they have reached this stage. This dynamic is therefore well and truly underway, but a large number of companies still have considerable potential for improving their performance and creating this associated value.
Businesses globally are currently in the observability adoption phase. In France, the trend is similar: 50% of professionals surveyed plan to increase their observability budget next year and 19% to maintain it. If new digital technologies and artificial intelligence have made it possible to achieve a leap forward in terms of productivity gains and innovation, the widespread adoption of observability should allow companies to achieve a new stage of growth.