Key Findings

Hypothesis: Adopting observability tools, site reliability engineering (SRE) practices and a culture of shared ownership translates to efficiencies across the software engineering cycle, better end-user experiences and ultimately Production Excellence.

1. Observability enables production excellence.
   Advanced observability enables better outcomes for engineering and DevOps / SRE teams. Survey respondents with advanced observability are more aware of where their tech debt lies, are more proactive about paying it down, have more confidence in their ability to detect bugs in production, and have more satisfied end-users.
2. Three in four teams have yet to begin or are early in their observability journeys.
   Around a quarter of survey respondents exhibit advanced observability practices. A plurality of teams are actively on their journeys but still early, with some observability tooling or processes—but not both. The remainder of respondents are generally aware of observability and its benefits—though some conflate observability with tangential practices like metrics monitoring and log management tooling—but have not developed plans for or prioritized observability that encompasses practices and culture in addition to tooling.
3. There is momentum behind the shift toward achieving more observable systems.
   As the benefits of observability become clearer, most teams that are not already practicing at an advanced level have near-term plans to move in that direction. Of the 47% of community respondents whose teams are not currently practicing observability, three in four have a plan to do so within the next two years.
4. Advanced observability practitioners focus on outcomes.
   By framing observability objectives around desired outcomes including higher quality instrumented code, predictable release cadence, confidence in detecting bugs, ability to resolve incidents, and maintain resilient systems, teams can better position themselves to achieve production excellence.

Observability Defined

Observability is having the tooling and processes in place to be able to ask arbitrary questions about your environment without—and this is the key component—having to know ahead of time what you wanted to ask. But what does that look like in practice? What sets apart organizations with the most advanced observability? Our research1 verifies that teams who have invested in making their systems observable are more likely to:

1. Have code that is well-understood, well-maintained, and has a low level of bugs.
2. Have the ability to follow predictable release cycles because they confidently address issues that arise.
3. Understand the end-to-end performance of their systems, including their technical debt.
4. Have the ability to visualize context-rich events that allow efficient, focused, and actionable on-call processes.
5. Have the ability to prioritize responsiveness to user behavior and feedback.