Observability leaders shave $20 million off downtime costs 

The most sophisticated observability practitioners or “leaders” were able to cut downtime costs by 90%, from an estimated $23.8 million annually to just $2.5 million, compared to observability beginners, according to the State of Observability 2022 Report from Splunk.

Conducted in early-February 2022 in partnership with the Enterprise Strategy Group, the global survey covered 1,250 application development and IT operations leaders from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, The United Kingdom and the United States.

Findings show that leaders in observability are more innovative and more successful at achieving digital transformation outcomes and other initiatives.

Leaders have launched 60% more products or revenue streams from AppDev teams in the last year compared to beginners, and report a 69% better mean time to resolution for unplanned downtime or performance degradation thanks to investment in observability.

Also, 66% of leaders report that their visibility into application performance is excellent (compared to just 44% of beginners). Similarly, 64% of leaders report that visibility into their security posture is excellent (versus 42% of beginners).

Twice as many leaders can detect problems associated with internally developed applications within minutes, resulting in an estimated 37% better MTTD. 

Increased cloud complexity also highlights how imperative becoming an observability leader is for all enterprises, and 70% of respondents are using multiple cloud services.

Three in every four (75%) of respondents have many cloud-native applications that run in multiple environments, either multiple public clouds or a combination of on-premises and public clouds.

Leaders are even more likely to report commonly running cloud-native applications (92% versus 68% of beginners). And 36% of organisations (and 47% of leaders) that use the public cloud to run internally developed applications use three or more different public clouds today, and 67% expect to do so within 24 months. 

Further, Singapore organisations appear to be trailing behind their global peers when it comes to their confidence in the adoption of observability tools, with 15% reporting that they have been significantly adding new capabilities, less than half of the 33% reported across other countries.

When it comes to observability challenges, 28% of Singaporean organisations say that it’s too hard to use or learn observability tools, compared to 19% across other countries.

Only 29% of Singapore organisations shared that they were completely confident in their ability to meet application availability and performance SLAs versus 49% on average across other countries.

“Organisations that use the right observability tools and practices and build to attract talent stand the best chance of becoming leaders in observability,” said Spiros Xanthos, SVP and General Manager, Observability, Splunk.

“By tackling data volume and variety with AI, organisations can alleviate staffing concerns, while at the same time investing in skills training to draw in the very best talent available.”