IT Trends Report 2023: Observability Advances Automation and Empowers Innovation, Yet Adoption Still in Early Stages

Ahead of IT Pro Day 2023, SolarWinds report Lessons From Observability Leaders finds enterprises that leverage observability increase operational efficiency and grow revenue

SolarWinds (NYSE:SWI), a leading provider of simple, powerful, secure observability and IT management software, released the findings of its 2023 IT Trends Report: Lessons From Observability Leaders. The report explores how enterprises can act proactively to maximize the advantages of their observability solutions, integrate best practices into implementations, and mitigate common adoption challenges. The report also found that companies implementing observability benefit from increased operational efficiency, faster innovation, and better business outcomes overall.

The new report is released in advance of IT Pro Day 2023, which falls on September 19 this year, and highlights a stark contrast between enterprises that have embraced observability and their peers who have not. Among the findings, the survey uncovered that observability leaders—those who follow best practices to leverage observability and report experiencing better business and IT outcomes as a result —are three times more likely to say their organization is doing extremely well with growing revenue, more than twice as likely to say the same about operational efficiency, and 2.5 times more likely to say they’re excelling with the speed of innovation. Observability leaders also gave higher ratings to their organization’s employee experience, including lower levels of reported employee burnout and fewer skill gaps on their teams.

These takeaways come at a critical time, as IT environments become increasingly complex, and companies experience more challenges in efficiently addressing IT issues as a result. According to the findings, the typical enterprise suffers from an average of nine brownouts or outages every month, lasting around twelve hours each, at an average annual cost of $13.7MM. Observability has emerged as a solution to not only preemptively detect anomalies and potential issues before they escalate into full-blown outages but to proactively address those issues at the root cause and prevent future outages.

“Outages and security concerns are no longer just an IT problem, and observability is no longer just an IT solution,” said Jeff Stewart, Field CTO and vice president, global solutions engineering at SolarWinds. “The better business, innovation, and technology outcomes experienced by observability leaders prove the benefits to every level, department, and employee. The findings of this year’s report should serve as an urgent call to action for business leaders who believe they can’t afford to invest in observability tools—when the truth is that we’re rapidly entering a landscape in which companies simply can’t afford to risk being without them.”

The survey also highlighted trends among the observability leaders reporting fewer and less frequent challenges in their ecosystem, finding the majority are:

• Investing in top priorities: Data shows organizations using observability solutions to support the priorities most critical to their growth and success: improve their customer experience (96%), enable faster innovation (71%), reduce time spent solving (71%), and detecting (60%) issues, and increase operational efficiency (55%).
• More automated and integrated: Observability leaders embracing automation and investing in tools that provide enhanced efficiency are 214% more likely to say they are doing extremely well with operational efficiency, 750% more likely to say they are doing extremely well with auto-remediation of complex alerts, and 300% better at automatically collecting background diagnostic data for IT support staff.
• Ahead on IT: The data found that those ahead of the curve on observability are also leading by huge margins when it comes to monitoring, detecting, and resolving issues that could otherwise bring the business to a screeching halt. When it comes to IT, they are 233% better at auto-escalation of tickets, 213% better at auto-remediation of simple alerts, and 36% better at settling alert levels based on historical behavior.

SolarWinds offers its customers full-stack observability solutions that provide organizations across all sizes and industries cost-effective, end-to-end visibility and actionable intelligence to expedite remediation using powerful machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. These fully integrated, on-premises, and cloud-native SaaS solutions provide comprehensive visibility in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, including SolarWinds Observability and SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability.

To read the full Lessons From Observability Leaders report, visit www.it-trends.solarwinds.com

Methodology

SolarWinds partnered with Eleven Research to field this enterprise survey of 300 senior IT professionals at small, medium, and large enterprises in North America. In order to define the "Leaders" and "Laggards" groups, responses related to organizations' business and IT approach and outcomes (e.g. frequency and severity of outages) were scored. Overall respondent scores were then distributed across three categories, with the top-scoring third taking on the "Leaders" designation and the bottom-scoring third designated as "Laggards."

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About SolarWinds

SolarWinds (NYSE:SWI) is a leading provider of simple, powerful, secure observability and IT management software built to enable customers to accelerate their digital transformation. Our solutions provide organizations worldwide—regardless of type, size, or complexity—with a comprehensive and unified view of today’s modern, distributed, and hybrid network environments. We continuously engage with IT service and operations professionals, DevOps and SecOps professionals, and database administrators (DBAs) to understand the challenges they face in maintaining high-performing and highly available hybrid IT infrastructures, applications, and environments. The insights we gain from them, in places like our THWACK community, allow us to address customers’ needs now and in the future. Our focus on the user and our commitment to excellence in end-to-end hybrid IT management have established SolarWinds as a worldwide leader in solutions for observability, IT service management, application performance, and database management. Learn more today at www.solarwinds.com.

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