Where observability pays off: uptime, digital experience, and engineering excellence

Every engineering leader gets the same question at budget time: what are we actually getting for our observability spend? It’s a fair question, and most teams struggle to answer it. The tools work, incidents get resolved faster, but the financial impact across people, processes, and technology rarely shows up in a form your CFO can use. 

The fix is to map your telemetry to business outcomes you can measure. New Relic has a proven record of helping hundreds of thousands of customers do this, and the pattern is consistent:  The value concentrates in three areas – business uptime, digital experience, and engineering excellence. 

Here’s 16,000+ businesses that run on New Relic measure value in each area.Or skip ahead and run your own numbers in  our Business Value Calculator to see the potential ROI for your business.

Business Uptime 

Unmatched system reliability is essential for reducing lost revenue from outages, preventing customer churn, and protecting brand reputation. Observability empowers organizations to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues before they escalate into costly disruptions. Here’s how focusing on Business Uptime clearly captures the value of observability for your business:

• Improve system resilience: Reduce downtime and unplanned outages, keeping customers engaged and improving conversion.
• Ensure peak performance: Scale up confidently during peak events and proactively detect and resolve issues with a unified view of your entire stack.

Case example: BlackLine and Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) achieved significant reductions in overall cloud spend by leveraging observability. BlackLine saved $16 million annually, and IGS reduced monitoring costs by 58% while improving mean time to recovery for better digital experiences by consolidating observability platforms.

Digital Experience

Delivering flawless, engaging digital products is essential for building customer loyalty and maximizing lifetime value. Observability provides full-stack visibility across the entire user journey, ensuring every front-end interaction translates into positive business outcomes. Here’s how observability helps elevate your customers' digital experience.

• Improve real user experience: Increase conversions and reduce churn by delivering better digital experiences, boosting customer lifetime value and revenue.

Case example: William Hill and The Seven Network (commonly known as Channel 7) have leveraged observability to achieve significant improvements in uptime. William Hill reported an 80% improvement in mean time to incident recovery (MTTR), and The Seven Network achieved 100% uptime during peak streaming periods of major events.

Engineering Excellence

Innovation is at the heart of staying competitive in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. Achieving engineering excellence requires accelerating developer productivity, securing modern architectures, and seeing AI agents’ performance, LLM workflows, and dynamic interactions natively without instrumentation gaps. Here’s how observability empowers engineering teams to deliver high-quality software faster:

• Drive developer productivity: Enable engineers to debug sooner, connect anomalies to specific lines of code, and prevent errors from impacting your business.
• Increase release velocity: Streamline issue resolution for faster developer (CI/CD) pipelines by systematically tracking the effects of code commits on application performance to meet service level objectives (SLOs).
• Accelerate app modernization and AI: Reduce OPEX, increase revenue, and unlock rapid AI adoption.
• Increase application security: Protect your brand more efficiently by using risk data to prioritize genuine exploits and avoid chasing false positives.
• Decrease cloud hosting costs: Reduce spending across multi-cloud environments by stopping the over-provisioning of cloud services, storage, and compute resources.
• Consolidate observability platforms: Decrease operational expenditure (OPEX) and increase efficiency by consolidating monitoring tools for lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and less context switching.

Case example: World Kinect and DAZN achieved faster innovation thanks to the enhanced visibility and control provided by observability. DAZN achieved 5,000 new code releases per day, and World Kinect reduced troubleshooting time by 75%.

Discover how New Relic observability can benefit your business

Now that you know more about the critical areas where observability provides the most significant impact, try the New Relic Value Calculator and get a report on the value of observability for your organization and see why the world’s best teams rely on New Relic for business success.