The complexity and scalability of today’s digital architectures, combined with the accelerating pace of software innovation and development, increase the risks to system availability, reliability and performance. One in two companies in France * plans to increase their investments in observability to consolidate their tools and gain a unified, real-time view of their architecture. They therefore aim to gain resilience and performance, but above all to improve the customer experience and increase innovation.
Better identification of faults to optimize their resolution
Whether you serve millions of customers or thousands of businesses around the world, human error is the cause of 49% of IT failures. Most often, these occur during routine and essential operations: configuring new software versions, updating intermediate software, changing the infrastructure, improving security. The other most common category of failure occurs during peak traffic. It often reveals undersizing and saturation issues in the architecture or design limitations that compromise scalability.
These defects then generate performance degradation and system collapse. By providing a fully connected view of all software telemetry data from one place, observability helps identify problems before they impact services, customers, and the business. According to the Observability Forecast, a study conducted by Cabinet ETR *, organizations that have already implemented full observability of their stack experience low impact business outages once a week or more *, compared to 76.1% of those who have not implemented full observability.
More responsive DevOps for ultra-customized solutions
In a post-COVID world where more than 50% of global economic activity takes place through digital channels, companies need to be responsive. Developers need to be able to move from idea to implementation, including code distribution, faster and more frequently. Using a DevOps approach and microservices architecture, the developer is able to deploy new versions on demand, much more often. Plus, with observability, it can instantly validate that they are behaving as you expect and, in case of problems, revert to the previous version to fix bugs.
Instead of spending 40% of his time solving incidents in production, he has more freedom to improve the resilience and scalability of his stack. Innovate more, for example by developing more features for customers and product teams. Also according to the Observability Forecast, companies that have matured their observability practice are significantly more likely to use the observability of the entire stack at all stages of the software development cycle (53% for planning, 46% for construction, 51% for implementation and 54% for operation) than the others.
Increased productivity to better meet user needs
In recent years, companies have understood that if observability serves to guarantee an optimal basis – availability, reliability, performance – it also allows them to reach direct economic issues of effectiveness and efficiency, such as increasing productivity and reducing 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 therefore much better equipped to optimize company growth by improving conversion rate, customer experience and customer satisfaction. The Observability Forecast shows that for about one third of the professionals interviewed, 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%).
Greater investment in observability
Businesses are moving from the era of monitoring, which consists of responsive incident resolution, to the era of observability and proactive performance management in real time. Decision makers have understood that the digital challenge is not just managing and solving problems but above all increasing business performance. To do this, CIOs and CTOs know they need to consolidate their ecosystem of tools in a progressive but effective way, in order to simplify it and move to full stack observability. However, while the study shows that 78% of them recognize that this full stack observability will enable them to achieve all of their business goals – agility, efficiency, customer experience, real-time reliability – only 27% of respondents believe they will having achieved this stage goal. This dynamic is therefore well underway, even though a large number of companies still have significant potential to improve their performance and create this associated value.
Companies globally are currently in the phase of adopting observability. In France, the trend is similar: 50% of interviewed professionals plan to increase their observability budget next year and 19% to keep it *. If new digital technologies and Artificial Intelligence have enabled a leap forward in terms of productivity and innovation gains, the widespread adoption of observability should enable companies to reach a new stage of growth.
* Observability Forecast 2022 – A study by Enterprise Technology Research and commissioned by New Relic, September 2022 – Sample of 1,614 people, including 1,044 professionals, daily users of observability tools, as well as 570 IT decision makers in 14 countries around the world, including France.
