Three-quarters of companies now use open source observability tools
A new report from Grafana Labs looks at the maturity and evolution of the observability landscape, from the complex challenges teams are facing to the tools and tactics they're implementing to overcome them.
The study, based on 1,255 responses, shows 75 percent of respondents are now using open source licensing for observability into software performance, with 70 percent reporting that their organizations use both Prometheus and OpenTelemetry in some capacity. Half of all organizations have increased their investments in both technologies for the second year in a row.
Around three-quarters of all companies now say observability is business-critical at either the CTO, VP, or director level, with CTO being the most common response (33 percent).
The number one observability concern for respondents is complexity, while alert fatigue is cited as being the biggest obstacle to faster incident response, so it’s no wonder training-based alerts and faster root cause analysis topped respondents' AI/ML wishlist for observability.
Three-quarters of enterprises say cost is an important criteria when selecting observability technologies, though less than a third say they're concerned about observability costing too much. Organizations are more focused on getting value from their tools and techniques than just selecting the cheapest option.
"Our 2025 Observability Survey confirms that organizations are embracing a diverse, open source-centric approach to observability," says Tom Wilkie, CTO of Grafana Labs. "With teams managing more tools and data sources than ever before, the findings show that complexity remains the top challenge. We're working to directly address these pain points by enhancing interoperability between technologies like OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, reducing the cognitive load through AI-powered features, and providing out-of-the-box integrated solutions like Kubernetes Monitoring."
OpenTelemetry has continued its move toward mainstream status with half of all organizations increasing their investments in the open source project for the second year in a row. 67 percent of respondents use Prometheus in production in some capacity and while OpenTelemetry has less production usage (41 percent), it appears to have more momentum for future growth, with 38 percent of respondents investigating it and only six percent reporting they have no plans to use it at all.
You can see the full survey on the Grafana Labs site.
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