They resolve issues faster, boost developer productivity, control costs and improve customer satisfaction.

Observability can help organisations gain a competitive advantage, according to The State of Observability 2024 report by Splunk and Enterprise Strategy Group.

Organisations with highly mature observability practices (or observability leaders) were found to achieve a 2.6x annual return on their investments (ROI) across areas like operational efficiency and uptime. They resolve issues faster, boost developer productivity, control costs and improve customer satisfaction.

By adopting a leading observability practice, an organisation can understand its entire digital footprint and reduce the impacts of downtime. Sixty-eight percent of observability leaders say they are aware of application problems within minutes or seconds of an outage, which is 2.8 times faster than the rate of beginning organisations.

Observability leaders estimate that 80% of alerts are legitimate, in contrast to 54% from beginning organisations, providing greater certainty and reducing time spent on resolving false alarms. This difference in accuracy and response time is significant as customer expectations for seamless and secure digital experiences are at an all-time high.

The report also reveals that 76% of observability leaders deploy the majority of their application code on demand. Moreover, developers in leading organisations spend 38% more of their time on innovation instead of toilsome work like troubleshooting and triaging incidents.

Besides that, 97% of respondents claim to use artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning(ML)- powered systems to enhance their observability operations, as compared to 66% last year.

For instance, 85% of observability leaders remediate half or more of their alerts due to recommendations from AI/ML-powered tools. Nearly two-thirds (65%) lean on AIOps to pinpoint and remediate the root cause of incidents with greater intelligence and automation.

“Building a leading observability practice means being obsessed with delivering incredible digital experiences to your customers, and embedding that mindset into every decision. Our report shows this mindset pays off. Leaders not only achieve greater success in mitigating downtime, they also see greater developer innovation and speed,” says Patrick Lin, senior vice president and general manager for Observability at Splunk.