A global survey of 1,250 observability practitioners, managers and other experts published today by Splunk found that sophisticated observability practitioners are able to cut downtime costs by 90%. That figure is based on an estimated cost of $23.8 million annually for comparative newcomers to $2.5 million. However, only 9% of respondents are advanced enough to be considered observability leaders compared to 59% that are still beginners.

Those leaders reported they are seeing a 69% better mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) for unplanned downtime or performance degradation thanks to investment in observability. The survey also noted those same organizations launched 60% more products or revenue streams from application development initiatives in the last year.

Observability has always been a core DevOps tenet, but achieving and maintaining is a challenge. Most DevOps teams today aspire to be able to maintain some level of continuous monitoring. However, as it becomes easier and less costly to instrument applications, interest is rising in observability platforms that make it simpler to launch queries and investigate anomalies.

Spiros Xanthos, senior vice president and general manager for observability at Splunk, said observability platforms are clearly driving down the cost of downtime. There is also a clear correlation between organizations that have embraced observability and the number of microservices-based cloud-native applications that have been deployed, he noted. In effect, increased complexity is driving organizations to turn to observability platforms to manage IT environments in the age of the cloud, said Xanthos.

The survey found 75% of respondents have multiple cloud-native applications that run in multiple environments. Just over one-third (34%) of internally developed applications are based on microservices constructed using containers, with 28% of respondents reporting they exclusively run cloud-native applications on public cloud infrastructure.

Overall, the survey also found that two-thirds of leaders reported their visibility into application performance is excellent compared to 44% of beginners, while 64% of leaders reported that visibility into their security posture is excellent compared to 42% for beginners.

The survey also found 59% of leaders can push code to production on demand for most internally developed applications compared to 28% of beginners. A total of 41% of leaders said they can detect problems associated with internally developed applications within minutes compared to 20% for beginners.

It’s still early days as far as adoption of observability platforms is concerned but, theoretically, IT should become easier to manage even as the number of platforms employed continues to expand. Advances in analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) are improving the signal-to-noise ratio so that not only are more issues being surfaced sooner but that more trusted recommendations are being made, said Xanthos.

Observability is, of course, a journey. Most organizations are not even quite sure what type of questions they should formulate to get the most value from investment in an observability platform. Organizations should start small, with a finite project to gain an understanding of how to leverage observability more broadly as they gain more maturity, said Xanthos.

Regardless of the approach to observability, the one thing that is certain is that traditional IT monitoring is no longer sufficient in an era where IT environments get more complex by the day.