Harris Poll 2022 State of Observability Report Findings

Interest in observability is at an all-time high. When we attended KubeCon in Los Angeles in October, observability and security were everywhere—in conversations with attendees and other vendors, during sessions, and in messaging at booths—indicating that there’s still an unmet need. In fact, Gartner declared that observability is at the ‘peak of inflated expectations' in a recent Hype Cycle report. We wanted to do a deep dive to understand the most pervasive pain points around the topic so we partnered with the Harris Poll to do just that. 

They spoke to more than 200 senior engineering professionals who are responsible for observability and log data management at companies across the United States. They found that 85% of people working in this space believe that true observability is possible but, for most, it’s not yet attainable. And it is often not for lack of investment, with nearly 40% of respondents spending $300K or more annually on observability tools. 

The findings highlight the critical importance of log data to observability use cases, such as tracking performance of applications and capacity resources, informing product improvements, and identifying threats and anomalous activity. However, fewer than half of respondents are very satisfied with their ability to use log data for any one of these purposes. And when outcomes fall short of expectations, respondents said frustration stems from three key areas:

• 66% say that tools are not easy to use 
• 67% say that it’s hard to collaborate across teams
• 58% struggle to route security events
  

In each situation, teams report spending more time than they should trying to resolve issues. 

It’s clear that organizations need to drive more value from their observability data, but they are struggling to find tools that make it easy for multiple stakeholders to extract actionable insights. Our customers tell us that a number of challenges are holding them back, including; organizational and data silos, the explosion of data that’s resulted from cloud-native environments, and vendor lock-in with tools that don’t meet the needs of multiple data consumers. This is magnified for teams that embrace DevOps and DevSecOps, that are accelerating with autonomy, aligned around innovation, and expected to have greater access to data. 

We believe that integrating the right data into engineers' workflows is core to solving the observability problem and strengthening cybersecurity defenses. Especially in a world that has moved towards DevSecOps, the solution needs to make the workflow of managing observability data simple and effective. Mezmo's, formerly LogDNA’s, innovations in this area form a powerful foundation to meet today’s critical scale, storage, and routing requirements. Mezmo gives enterprises the freedom to route data to the application and human specialists who best know how to unlock its value so that data isn’t bottled up in a single pane of glass, but unleashed for use across all possible panes of glass. 

Download the full report and then reach out to an expert at Mezmo to help you unlock the true value of your observability data.