Observability’s adoption is on the rise among members of ASEAN and full-stack observability leads to business and/or revenue growth, increased operational efficiency, and security vulnerability management, according to the Observability Forecast 2023 report from New Relic.
This year’s survey covered 1,700 technology professionals, including 1,100 practitioners — day-to-day users of observability tools — and 600 IT decision-makers across 15 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and North America.
While almost a third (30%) of respondents estimated that business-critical application outages cost their organisation at least US$500,000 per hour of downtime, Indonesia and Singapore both had the highest median annual ROI on their observability investment (167%).
Respondents surveyed in ASEAN (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand) continue to struggle with tool sprawl.
More than half (57%) were using five or more tools for observability, even if 26% said too many monitoring tools was the primary challenge to achieving full-stack observability.
This may change next year as almost half (48%) planned to consolidate tools over the next year to get the most value from their observability spend.
The study also found that observability adoption is high and increasing, with over half (55%) in ASEAN having achieved full-stack observability (68% in Indonesia, 60% in Malaysia, and 46% in Thailand).
Indonesia most likely to have a mature observability practice, where 81% of local respondents deploy 10 or more capabilities. Indonesia outranked Thailand (64%), Malaysia (63%) and Singapore (27%).
Outages are frequent and expensive as nearly half (45%) of the respondents experienced high-business-impact outages once a week or more, 46% take at least 30 minutes to detect them, and 62% take at least 30 minutes to resolve them.
Also, full-stack observability improves service-level metrics as 79% in Thailand and 74% in both Indonesia and Malaysia said their MTTR improved to some extent since adopting observability, compared to 44% for Singapore.
Further, revenue retention is a top benefit of observability. The key benefits cited by respondents in ASEAN are revenue retention (54%), business and/or revenue growth (41%) and revenue-generating use cases (34%). Most (85%) see observability as a key enabler to achieve core business goals to some degree.
“Teams with full-stack observability consistently have fewer outages while detecting and resolving issues faster than those without,” said Peter Marelas, chief architect in APJ at New Relic.
“This translates to lower outage costs, a higher annual return on investment, and a positive effect on an organisation’s bottom line,” said Marelas. “The business value of observability is clear.”
Observability remains a business imperative for forward-thinking enterprise leaders. By mid-2026, 82% or more of global respondents expected to deploy each of the 17 different observability capabilities.
Most organisations may have robust observability practices in place within three years, highlighting the industry’s growth potential.
Nearly half (49%) indicated an increased focus on security was driving the need for observability, followed by the integration of business apps into workflows and the adoption of AI technologies.
The security focus reflects the rise of cybersecurity threats and complex cloud-native application architectures that introduce additional risk.
For OpenTelemetry, scalability (52%) and the fact that it integrates with their existing tool stack (46%) were driving its adoption, indicating that OpenTelemetry is a movement vendors must embrace to meet customer demands.
