What is the Future of Observability?
Ok, so you’re a DevOps engineer working at a Nonprofit, and you are tasked with setting the Observability strategy for the next year for your organization. So let’s explore observability deployment plans for the next two to three years, AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) usage plans, and what steps organizations are most likely to take in the next year to get the most value out of their observability spend.
Future of observability highlights:
83% anticipated deploying at least 1 new capability next year
82%+ expected to deploy the 17 observability capabilities by 2026
47% planned to train staff on how to best use existing observability tools
Overall, organizations continue to see the business value of observability — and expect to invest more in it.
When we look at the summary for one year out, capability deployment expectations are at least 90% for capabilities like network monitoring, database monitoring, security monitoring, and alerts.
Even with some of the observability capabilities that respondents were less likely to have already deployed (like synthetic monitoring, Kubernetes monitoring, distributed tracing, serverless monitoring, and ML model performance monitoring), we see numbers in the high-60% to mid-70% range.
These results indicate that respondents have big plans to deploy additional observability capabilities again this year. By mid-2024, at least two-thirds expected to deploy each of the 17 different observability capabilities (currently it’s 23% or more).
Deployment plans summary
Forward-looking enterprise leaders continue to implement observability as a business imperative. It’s interesting to see how aggressively respondents once again expect to have most capabilities deployed in the next year and the next two to three years.
By mid-2026, 82% or more expected to deploy each of the 17 different observability capabilities. Very few of our survey respondents did not expect to deploy these observability capabilities (up to 16%).
This stated intent to deploy a large number of observability capabilities is once again one of the most eye-opening results from this study as it suggests that most organizations may have robust observability practices in place by 2026. The finding highlights the current state of observability and growth potential in the near future.
AIOps usage plans
We wanted to know where organizations fall on the spectrum between the deployment of manually configured incident detection (alerting) and completely autonomous, AI-led incident detection. So we asked respondents to what extent their organization anticipates using AIOps in its incident detection and remediation workflows one year from now and found that:
- Almost three-quarters (70%) planned to rely more on manually configured incident detection, while 52% planned to adopt a more AI-led approach.
- Only 16% said it would be mostly manually configured.
- Just 8% said it would be mostly AI-led.
Of the respondents who said they plan to deploy AIOps in the next year, 40% anticipated it being more manually configured, and 25% more AI-led.
These results indicate that while incident detection deployment plans for next year were more heavily weighted toward manual configuration, there’s an increasing demand for automatic detection. Therefore, we believe that there’s an opportunity for observability vendors to increase the adoption of automatic detection as they build customer trust in its accuracy, reliability, and relevance.
Value maximization plans for observability
We were interested to know what steps organizations are most likely to take in the next year to get the most value out of their observability spend. The survey results showed that:
- Nearly half (47%) planned to train staff on how to best use the observability tools they have.
- Roughly two in five (41%) planned to consolidate tools.
- About a third planned to optimize their engineering team size (33%) and/or reduce spending across the board (31%).
- The rest planned to use open source (27%), switch to a more affordable vendor (26%), or observe less of their tech stack (20%).
- Just 3% said they won’t take steps to get the most value out of their observability spend.
Of the respondents whose organization had achieved full-stack observability (by the report’s definition), 47% said their organization is most likely to consolidate tools in the next year to get the most value out of their observability spend compared to 38% whose organizations had not achieved full-stack observability.
These results indicate that once organizations reach the milestone of achieving full-stack observability, the next logical step is to optimize it further by consolidating tools. In addition, they show that training is a key factor in maximizing value for observability spend.
This is a clear sign that organizations are facing financial pressure and seeking to lay off staff or make the best use of what they have by training staff and consolidating where practical.
I think having an observability tool is important, but how you use it is even more important. It should be doing the job for you. Because, if you don’t know how to use it, over time, you start realizing, that the cost is high but you’re not really getting any value.
Cybersecurity architect, from a gaming enterprise organization.
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