The majority of ANZ businesses believe observability is essential, only a handful use it

A new survey finds while 92% of ANZ respondents believe observability is essential and strategic to their business, only 25% have fully developed observability practices.

New Relic has released the findings of its 2021 Observability Forecast. The survey covered more than 1,300 software engineers, developers and IT leaders globally and found that 92% of ANZ respondents believe observability is important and strategic to their business, and 52% believe it to be very important and strategic to their role, but only 25% noted mature observability practices within their company.

Recognising the importance of closing that gap, 82% of survey respondents say they expect to increase their observability budget in the coming year, with 15% expecting budgets to increase significantly.

"IT teams are under an unprecedented amount of pressure to ensure they keep up with the pace of innovation demanded by customers," says New Relic, Asia Pacific and Japan, senior VP, Ben Goodman.

"This means shipping new features fast while ensuring downtime is kept to a minimum. Modern observability empowers software engineers, developers and decision-makers with the information they need to make swift, data-driven decisions. It is non-negotiable for enterprises looking to deliver great digital experiences that keep their customers coming back."

He says during the pandemic, most organisations accelerated their digital transformation initiatives by as much as three or four years. This phenomenon has condensed software development cycles and burdened data pipelines, making both increasingly complex for engineers and developers.

Despite the promises and because digital experiences are built on thousands of microservices, today's monitoring tools often require engineers to spend an unreasonable amount of time stitching together siloed data and switching context between a patchwork of analysis tools.

Even still, says New Relic, engineers get stuck on what is happening instead of focusing on why it's happening. With 87% of ANZ survey respondents noting having to toggle between two and ten different tools to monitor the health of their systems.

This all comes at a high cost to businesses in shipping delays, slow responses to outages, poor customer experiences and time wasted.

Consolidating tools into a single, unified observability platform is among the report's five key insights for charting an organisations' path to achieving modern observability:

• Adopting a data-driven approach for end-to-end observability. 
• Expanding observability across the entire software ecosystem.
• Modernising the IT budget for full-stack observability.
• Up-leveling the value of observability to further engage the C-Suite.

"Modern observability is the domain of engineers and business leaders alike because of its ability to make crucial data easily accessible, understandable and actionable," says Goodman.

"By taking a data-driven approach and creating a clear line of sight across the tech stack, modern observability can improve uptime and reliability while creating best of breed customer experiences."