Future of observability

This section explores observability deployment and data integration plans for next year and the next two to three years, and what steps organizations are most likely to take in the next year to get the most value out of their observability spend.

Highlights:

In addition to asking survey-takers about their current observability deploymeny, we inquired about their deployment plans for next year and the next two to three years.

Looking out to 2025, most (91%) expected to deploy at least one new capability in the next year, more than half (59%) expected to deploy one to five, and more than a third (37%) expected to deploy seven or more capabilities.

When we look at the summary for one year out, capability deployment expectations are at least 80% for capabilities like security monitoring and network monitoring. At least a third expected to deploy artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) capabilities (39%), AI monitoring (36%), machine learning (ML) model monitoring (34%), distributed tracing (33%), and serverless monitoring (33%).

By mid-2027, 75% or more expected to deploy each of the 19 different observability capabilities. Very few of our survey respondents did not expect to deploy these observability capabilities (up to 13%).

To practice true business observability, organizations must integrate their business-related data with their telemetry data (MELT). We already reviewed what types of data they currently integrate. Now let’s review the types of business-related data they said they plan to integrate in the next one to three years:

• About half planned to integrate each data type in the next one to three years.
• Most (89%) planned to integrate at least one data type, including 59% who planned to integrate five or more. Only 11% had no plans to integrate business-related data with their telemetry data.
• These results mean that by 2027, 89% will have integrated five or more business-related data types, including 57% who will have integrated all 10.

We were interested to know what steps organizations are most likely to take in the next year to get the most value out of their observability spend. The survey results showed that:

• Nearly half (47%) planned to train staff on how to best use the observability tools they have.
• Roughly two in five (41%) planned to consolidate tools.
• More than a third planned to optimize their engineering team size (37%).
• Nearly a third planned to reduce spending across the board (31%).
• The rest planned to switch to a more affordable vendor (28%), use open source (24%), or observe less of their tech stack (23%).
• Just 1% said they won’t take steps to get the most value out of their observability spend.

Of the respondents whose organization had achieved full-stack observability (by the report’s definition), 52% said their organization is most likely to consolidate tools in the next year to get the most value out of their observability spend compared to 37% whose organizations had not achieved full-stack observability.