To capture new insights into observability, New Relic partnered with Enterprise Technology Research (ETR) to conduct a survey and analysis for this second annual Observability Forecast report.

Last year, the 2021 Observability Forecast report focused on how, driven by digital transformation, full-stack observability (o11y) has become mission-critical to the success of every modern business. The report provided compelling reasons why it’s time for organizations to shift to full-stack observability so that they can plan, build, deploy, and run great software that powers optimal digital experiences for their customers, employees, partners, and suppliers.

This year, the 2022 Observability Forecast report focuses on the next chapter in the story—it looks at what’s driving observability practices today, how organizations are transforming those practices, and how observability impacts the lives of technical professionals. The report also includes a snapshot of emerging technologies that will potentially drive a further need for observability over the next three years.

Today, many organizations make do with a patchwork of tools to monitor their technology stacks, requiring extensive manual effort for fragmented views of their information technology (IT) systems and overall businesses. At the same time, survey respondents longed for—planned for—simplicity, integration, seamlessness, and more efficient ways to complete high-value projects.

Download an infographic of the executive summary.

Full-stack observability

The ability to see everything in the tech stack that could affect the customer experience is called full-stack observability or end-to-end observability. It is based on a complete view of all telemetry data.

With full-stack observability, engineers and developers don’t have to sample data, compromise their visibility into the tech stack, or waste time stitching together siloed data. Instead, they can focus on the higher-priority, business-impacting, and creative coding they love.

Full-stack observability, as used in this report, is achieved by organizations that deploy specific combinations of observability capabilities, including customer experience monitoring/DEM (front-end), services monitoring, log management, and environment monitoring (back-end).

See how many respondents had achieved full-stack observability.

For the purpose of this report, a mature observability practice employs at least these five characteristics:

• Unifies telemetry (metrics, events, logs, traces) in a single pane for consumption across teams
• Shifts developer and engineer time from incident response (reactive) towards higher-value work (proactive)
• Improves collaboration across teams to make decisions related to the software stack
• Mitigates service disruptions and business risk
• Improves revenue retention by deepening understanding of customer behaviors

Learn about the maturity of survey respondents’ observability practices.

Roles

Study participants consisted of practitioners and IT decision-makers (ITDMs). Practitioners are typically the day-to-day users of observability tools.

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Organization size

In this report, organization size is determined by employee count.

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Methodology

ETR sent survey respondents a questionnaire and compensated them for completing the survey.

All data in this report are derived from the survey, which was in the field from March to April 2022.

ETR qualified survey respondents on the basis of relevant expertise. ETR performed a non-probability sampling type called quota sampling to target sample sizes of respondents based on their country of residence and role type in their organizations (in other words, practitioners and ITDMs). Geographic representation quotas targeted 14 key countries.

All dollar amounts in this report are in USD.

Download the survey results.

Demographics

In 2022, ETR polled 1,614 technology professionals—more than any other observability report and 25% more than the 1,295 we polled in 2021—in the same 14 countries across Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America. France, Germany, Ireland, and the United Kingdom represented 44% of respondents. Approximately 31% of respondents were from Canada and the United States. The remaining 25% were from the broader Asia-Pacific region including Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Thailand. Download the full report to view regional highlights.

The survey respondent mix was about the same as last year—65% practitioners and 35% ITDMs. A running theme in the data is a split between what practitioners value and perceive and what ITDMs value and perceive regarding observability.

Respondents’ age ranged from 19–72 with 80% identifying as male and 20% identifying as female, which (unfortunately) reflects the gender imbalance among technology professionals today.

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Firmographics

More than half of survey respondents (56%) worked for midsize organizations, followed by 35% for large organizations, and 8% for small organizations.

For organization annual revenue, 17% had $1 million to $9.99 million (35% of those were small organizations and 55% were midsize), 43% had $10 million to $99.99 million (76% of those were midsize organizations), and 40% had $100 million or more (63% of those were large organizations).

The respondent pool represented a wide range of industries, including IT/telecommunications (telco), financial/insurance, industrials/materials/manufacturing, retail/consumer, healthcare/pharmaceutical (pharma), energy/utilities, services/consulting, education, nonprofit/unspecified, and government. Download the full report to view industry highlights.

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