Observability data drives key decisions on customer experience and more
The latest Splunk State of Observability report for 2025, released today by Cisco, shows that observability insights are guiding key business decisions in customer experience, product roadmap forecasting, and brand perception.
The study based on a survey of 1,855 ITOps and engineering professionals worldwide, and underscores how observability has evolved beyond an IT function to a boardroom priority. It finds 74 percent believe observability is important for monitoring critical business processes and 66 percent say it is key to understanding user journeys.
Observability is also driving improvements in customer experience (69 percent), service uptime (68 percent), and addressing the volume of customer support requests (55 percent).
“Observability practitioners are becoming critical stakeholders to key business decisions in customer engagement strategies, product roadmaps and more,” says Patrick Lin, the SVP, GM of observability at Splunk. “And this year’s State of the Observability report findings make that clear: the full life cycle and workflow of observability -- from data collection and analysis to deriving actionable insights and implementing improvements -- provides not just better context, but also support for the achievement of better results, whether in customer satisfaction, product innovation or the safeguarding of AI systems at scale.”
Effectiveness of observability practice is often measured by how well it responds to and prevents incidents. However, ITOps and engineering teams frequently struggle with too many disparate tools (59 percent) and a high volume of false alerts (52 percent).
To address these challenges, ITOps and engineering teams are embracing AI to boost their
troubleshooting -- 76 percent of respondents regularly use AI-powered observability in their everyday workflows. Current or future benefits of AI use include 78 percent having more time to spend on product innovation instead of app and infrastructure maintenance, while 60 percent predict AI will have a positive impact on troubleshooting and root cause analysis, and 58 percent say it will improve the detection of security vulnerabilities. It’s a double-edged sword, however, 47 percent say monitoring AI workloads has made their job more challenging and 40 percent cite lack of expertise as a challenge to achieving AI readiness.
You can get the full report from the Splunk site.
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