Respondents to sixth-annual Observability Pulse survey cite ‘lack of knowledge among teams’ as the biggest challenge to gaining observability into cloud-native environments.

PARIS, March 19, 2024 — KubeCon/CloudNativeCon Europe — Logz.io, provider of Open 360™, the industry’s easiest-to-use, most cost-efficient observability platform, shared today the results of its annual Observability Pulse survey (formerly known as the DevOps Pulse survey). The 2024 Observability Pulse Report reveals that observability is still an emergent practice on the maturity curve: Only one out of 10 organizations are utilizing full observability, that is, observing the real-time status of every component of the entire technology stack.

In 2024, the biggest challenge to gaining observability into cloud-native environments — cited by 48% of respondents — is lack of knowledge among the team. This is up from 30% in 2023, when “lack of knowledge” was the third-highest response to the question.

“You’d be hard pressed to find an organization today that does not have some intention or wish to have a robust observability strategy,” explained 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.”

Yigal said that in addition to lacking full visibility across logs, metrics, traces and other core elements of fully realized observability, most organizations are still chasing alerts driven by imprecise technical drivers, versus undertaking a strategic, business-informed approach.

“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,” continued 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.”

Additional Highlights from the 2024 Observability Pulse Report

  • Costs are forcing organizations to adapt and evolve their observability practices, with 52% of respondents saying they’re trying to gain better visibility into their monitoring costs, up from 36% a year ago.
  • MTTR keeps trending in the wrong direction, with 82% of Pulse respondents saying their MTTR during production incidents was over an hour, up from 74% in the 2023 survey, 64% in 2022, and 47% in 2021.
  • When asked about the challenges of running Kubernetes in production, monitoring/troubleshooting was noted as the top challenge in 2024 by 40% of respondents. Security was second at 37%, and networking was third at 33%.
  • Over three-quarters of respondents (76%) said adoption of OpenTelemetry (OTEL) or OTEL-centric tooling was at least somewhat important to their overall observability strategy.
  • Many organizations are trying out a platform engineering model — one where a single group enables observability for other teams. Eighty-seven percent (87%) of respondents said they’re using at least some form of this model, with 10% saying they’re planning to adopt a shared services model like this.

The 2024 Observability Pulse survey compiles data from 500 respondents from organizations across the globe. Respondents comprise a wide range of IT professionals, with titles ranging from developer and DevOps engineer to senior and chief IT executives.

Meet Logz.io at KubeCon
Logz.io is exhibiting at Booth J14, and Asaf Yigal is presenting a Lightning Talk, “Demystifying Kubernetes Observability with Generative AI and LLMs,” as a part of Observability Day today at 4:15 pm CET at Level 7.1, Room A.