3 Observability Takeaways from DevOps Pulse 2023

The observability landscape is changing fast, as organizations look to deploy applications and separate themselves from competition at a breakneck pace.

What are the trends organizations need to be aware of as they make sense of the landscape? Every year, we at Logz.io set out to answer this question by going right to the DevOps and observability practitioners on the front lines.

Logz.io Product Marketing Manager Gapilan “Cubby” Sivasithamparam and Co-founder and CTO Asaf Yigal recently hosted a webinar outlining the results of the 2023 DevOps Pulse survey. You can watch the webinar recap of Summarizing 2023 Observability Trends as well as dive deeper into some of the key takeaways from the report below.

Takeaway #1: MTTR is Trending in the Wrong Direction

Possibly the most concerning observability statistic to take away from the 2023 DevOpsPulse survey is a marked increase in mean time to recovery (MTTR) for organizations.

According to the 2023 survey, over 75% of responses said that their MTTR exceeds multiple hours—a 10% increase from our 2022 survey. As a result, only 14% of respondents stated they were satisfied with their current MTTR, indicating an urgent need for improvement.

There are a lot of factors that impact MTTR, including complex cloud technologies, siloed telemetry data and overall data pipeline monitoring and performance.

Due to the nature of current observability maturity, it’s a surprise that this critical measure is trending in the wrong direction.

“Part of the issue is the adoption of cloud technologies, Kubernetes and serverless” Asaf says on the webinar. “Organizations want a flexible and agile environment, but that’s what leads to more complexity.”

Asaf added that he’s seen organizations overcome MTTR issues in part by elevating the problems and creating service-level objectives around them instead of getting bogged down by alert fatigue. Proper automation and observability is the path towards reducing MTTR.

Takeaway #2: Kubernetes Adoption is Massive, and So Is Its Observability Challenge

Organizations are struggling to engage Kubernetes observability and security practices. Almost 50% of respondents to the 2023 DevOps Pulse survey cited Kubernetes as their main challenge to gaining full observability into their environment and about the same indicated Kubernetes security is the most difficult component of running the technology in production.

Additionally, some 80% of respondents highlighted that they either currently maintain or plan to implement a unified model for observability and security monitoring.

Much of the issue comes from the speed of digital business today.

“With fast application deployment, you can inadvertently introduce security risk and security vulnerabilities into your environment,” Asaf says. “This is why we see this trend specifically on Kubernetes.”

To combat these Kubernetes challenges, gaining knowledge of the system is a great place to start. Many organizations run Kubernetes without having the proper knowledge of how to actually deploy it.

“Having really good knowledge of Kubernetes, how it’s built, and how to set up the configuration properly is the key,” Asaf says.

Takeaway #3: Observability and Security Practices are Converging

Overall the 2023 DevOps Pulse survey showed that observability and security are starting to come together in ways that make sense for organizations.

In the survey, 46% of observability teams said they’re accountable for security, and 72% plan to or already have enacted a unified model for their security and observability. In addition, 85% state that the move to cloud native has introduced additional security challenges.

“Part of our assessment of what we see emerging in these trends is that observability is going to be an additional layer of looking at my Kubernetes cluster or my cloud environment,” Asaf says, “whether it’s available, performing or secure.”

There has also been a 9% increase in respondents reporting security tool integration challenges after migrating to cloud-native technologies as compared to the 2022 survey data. Meanwhile, the same percentage of respondents as compared to last year reported difficulties when it comes to prioritizing relevant security data in their ecosystem.

Read the entire 2023 DevOps Pulse survey report here. If you’d like to learn more about how to bring advanced observability practices into your environment, sign up for a free trial of the Logz.io Open 360^™ platform today.