2021 Observability Maturity Community Research Findings
Executive summary
The 2021 Observability Maturity Community Research Findings report is a follow- up to the inaugural report published in Q1 2020. The survey was commissioned by Honeycomb, which provides full-stack observability designed for high-cardinality data and collaborative problem-solving. Founded by Christine Yen and Charity Majors, two engineers with experience debugging problems at scale for tens of millions of users, Honeycomb empowers every engineer to interrogate application telemetry data in granular and arbitrary ways, so they can deeply understand and debug the behavior of their production systems.
The survey was conducted by ClearPath Strategies, with the goal of understanding community perceptions and awareness of observability, how engineering teams are approaching observability, and mapping an observability maturity scale that updates last year’s findings.
The 2021 survey found that, overall, observability adoption is on the rise. Organizations on the higher end of the observability maturity spectrum are realizing benefits, such as:
• Higher productivity
• Improvement in code quality
• End-user satisfaction
• Software developer retention
While overall adoption is on the rise, the report also finds that a majority of teams are at the earliest stages of observability maturity. Teams on the lower end of the spectrum are not realizing the same outcomes we see from organizations at the higher end, such as deploying more frequently, finding bugs more quickly before and after pushing to production, and reduced burnout.
Teams further along the observability maturity spectrum not only realized additional benefits; they also realized those benefits with higher-quality business outcomes—for example, virtually all the Advanced and nearly 9 in 10 of Intermediate respondents provide customer experiences that leave their customers either “Always Satisfied” or “Sometimes Satisfied” with their services.
In short, teams on the higher end of the observability spectrum realize clear value in several areas, including an improved ability to identify problems and solve those problems faster, more satisfied customers, and more confidence deploying frequently to production when compared to their less-mature counterparts.
The 2021 report details how observability can help your organization achieve production excellence and gain a competitive edge.
