Technology professionals today deal with a complex patchwork of data and tools to monitor and keep their tech portfolios up, running, and secure. We see that the current state of observability is frequently multi-tool and still involves engineers in significant amounts of manual effort and coordination between several systems and streams of data. For most organizations, the current state of observability:

• Is largely multi-tool
• Is not covering the full tech stack 
• Involves significant coordination and complexity between data streams and systems
• Requires manual effort and incident tickets to detect problems
• Has outage frequency, MTTD, and MTTR performance that could be improved

Respondents clearly seem to long for the simplicity of a single tool that does more to free them to pursue higher-value initiatives. Survey results show strong interest in a seamless, integrated future.

Organizations need to tackle fragmentation—of data, tools, and teams—that slows everyone down. Such fragmentation causes a host of downstream challenges, including suboptimal customer experiences, spiraling IT costs, engineer time wasted on toilsome/reactive tasks, inefficient allocation of resources, increasing competitive threats, and security vulnerabilities, among others.

We believe that they can achieve the best digital customer experience by consolidating disparate systems, tools, and information sources into a single observability platform. Maintaining the consistency, availability, and security of digital experiences is the key to success.

Prioritizing/achieving full-stack observability can help:

• Reduce outage frequency
• Improve detection time of outages (MTTD)
• Improve resolution time of outages (MTTR)

Despite many survey respondents citing a lack of understanding of the benefits of observability as a primary challenge to prioritizing/achieving it, the results taken as a whole indicate that they do see bottom-line benefits. Respondents are investing in their observability practices and want more, better, simpler observability. Organizations have bold expectations to ramp up observability capabilities and budgets sharply in the next three years, indicating a more mature and full-stack state of observability in the near future.

The potential of an all-in-one observability platform for every engineer at every stage of the software lifecycle is becoming increasingly clear. We’re right on the cusp of transformation in this area—an inflection point where organizations make the jump into deliberate, unified observability practices with less complexity and more ways to make work easier. In a few years, most organizations may look back and wonder how they managed to make do without full-stack observability.

Based on the survey results, we believe the ideal state of observability is one where organizations monitor the entire tech stack in all stages of the SDLC, employ mature observability practice characteristics, and have unified telemetry data and a unified dashboard or visualization of that data—ideally in a single, consolidated platform. So, how can organizations get to the ideal state of observability? They can start by addressing the challenges that often prevent it.

^{Challenges and solutions for attaining the ideal state of observability}

Once organizations have attained this ideal state of observability, the data shows that they see many positive outcomes.