Only 10 percent of companies have full observability into cloud environments

A new study shows that in 2024, the biggest challenge to gaining observability into cloud-native environments -- cited by 48 percent of respondents -- is lack of knowledge among the team. This is up from 30 percent in 2023.

The report from Logz.io shows only 10 percent of organizations are utilizing full observability, that is, observing the real-time status of every component of the entire technology stack.

"You'd be hard pressed to find an organization today that does not have some intention or wish to have a robust observability strategy," says Asaf Yigal, co-founder and CTO of Logz.io. "However, as the data reveals, we're still in the very early stages of adoption and implementation, with only a small fraction of organizations that know how to use full-stack observability to focus their engineering time and attention on the business objectives that are most critical to the organization."

Among other findings is that costs are forcing organizations to adapt and evolve their observability practices, with 52 percent of respondents saying they're trying to gain better visibility into their monitoring costs, up from 36 percent a year ago.

When asked about the challenges of running Kubernetes in production, monitoring/troubleshooting is noted as the top challenge in 2024 by 40 percent of respondents. Security was second at 37 percent, and networking was third at 33 percent.

Over three-quarters of respondents (76 percent) say adoption of OpenTelemetry (OTEL) or OTEL-centric tooling was at least somewhat important to their overall observability strategy.

Many organizations are also trying out a platform engineering model -- one where a single group enables observability for other teams. 87 percent of respondents say they’re using at least some form of this model, with 10 percent saying they’re planning to adopt a shared services model like this.

"Clearly, there is an enormous opportunity to help more organizations use observability tools to cut through the noise and focus on what really matters to their customers," adds Yigal. "We must also address the 'lack of knowledge' challenge by leveraging AI-driven capabilities to simplify and drastically improve the DevOps user experience for novices and experts alike. The mandate of the observability industry is to empower far-too-busy tech teams to move beyond simply monitoring and chasing alerts to instead spend their valuable time on addressing Service Level Objectives to impact the business’s bottom line."

The full report is available from the Logz.io site.

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