Splunk: Observability now a competitive differentiator

Splunk, the cybersecurity and observability player, has released The State of Observability 2024 report* in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). This global study examines the role of observability within today’s increasingly complex IT environments and rising customer expectations. 

Results show that observability has evolved into a competitive differentiator, with observability leaders achieving a 2.6x annual return on their investments across areas like operational efficiency and uptime. These organisations resolve issues faster, boost developer productivity, control costs and improve customer satisfaction. Due to such benefits, 86% of all respondents plan to increase their observability investments. 

Leading observability practices don’t just happen — they’re strategically built. The report outlines a new maturity framework that consists of four stages of observability sophistication: foundational visibility; guided insights; proactive response and unified workflows. Based on this framework, respondents were placed into one of four stages of observability maturity: 

- “Beginning” organisations (45%)

- “Emerging” organisations (27%)

- “Evolving” organisations (17%), or 

- Leaders (11%).

By adopting a leading observability practice, an organisation can understand their entire digital footprint and reduce the impacts of downtime. Sixty-eight percent of leading organisations say they’re aware of application problems within minutes or seconds of an outage – 2.8x faster than the rate of beginning organisations. 

Leading organisations estimate 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. Research shows downtime can dilute customer loyalty and damage public perception.

Speed gives leading organisations an edge in software development velocity. Seventy-six percent of leaders deploy the majority of their application code on demand, in contrast to 30% of beginners. In addition, developers in leading organisations spend 38% more of their time on innovation than beginning organisations, which means having to spend less time on tedious work like troubleshooting and triaging incidents. According to Splunk, it’s clear that for leading organisations, increased developer productivity and output drive profitability.

“Building a leading observability practice means being obsessed with delivering incredible digital experiences to your customers, and embedding that mindset into every decision,” said Patrick Lin, Senior VP and GM, Observability at Splunk. 

“Our report shows this mindset pays off. Leaders not only achieve greater success in mitigating downtime, they also see greater developer innovation and speed.”

The report has also found that OpenTelemetry, an open-source, industry-standard for collecting data, is becoming more widely adopted. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project gives organisations control over their data and alleviates vendor lock-in. The report highlights how OpenTelemetry is the foundation of an effective observability practice, with 58% saying their observability solution relies on OpenTelemetry. 

- OpenTelmetry signifies innovation and resilience, with 78% of leaders embracing the open-source standard and 57% experiencing lower observability costs.

- OpenTelemetry offers unparalleled flexibility. Seven in 10 (72%) leaders embrace OpenTelemetry to access a broader ecosystem of technologies, and 65% say the open-source project facilitates better control and ownership of data.

Using AI and ML (machine learning) within observability is table stakes. Nearly all survey respondents (97%) use AI and/or ML-powered systems to enhance their observability operations — a significant jump from 66% of respondents surveyed last year. 

Through AI and ML’s abilities to analyse and process large volumes of data to detect anomalies, identify root causes, recommend actions and automate tasks, teams get the insight they need more rapidly. 

- Over half (57%) of respondents agree the volume of alerts they receive is problematic. 

- Leaders experience far less alert noise, with 85% remediating half or more of their alerts due to recommendations from AI/ML-powered tools. In contrast, only 16% of beginning organisations say the same.

- Roughly two thirds (65%) of leaders lean on AIOps to pinpoint and remediate the root cause of incidents with greater intelligence and automation.

Another finding is around platform engineering, which is driving and enhancing the developer experience. Some 73% of respondents are practising it extensively, Splunk said. 

At its core, platform engineering embodies an approach where software engineers utilise common toolchains, workflows and self-service platforms, so they can spend less time managing their tools and focus more on pushing new, innovative products to market, Splunk said. This discipline comes at a welcome time for over extended ITOps and engineering teams as 66% of respondents say critical staff have left in the past year due to burnout. 

Organisations with teams dedicated to the practice are seeing the payoffs. When asked to rank their top three platform engineering outcomes, 55% of respondents said it increased IT operations efficiency, 42% said it improved application performance and 40% said it increased developer productivity.

- Almost six in 10 (58%) leaders view platform engineering as a competitive differentiator.

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Learn more about the State of Observability 2024 report.

*The global survey was conducted in May and June 2024 in partnership with the Enterprise Strategy Group. The report surveyed 1,850 ITOps staff, managers and executives, in addition to developers, engineers, architects and site reliability engineers (SREs) from organisations with 500 or more full-time employees and who are knowledgeable about their organisation’s observability practice. 

The survey respondents were drawn from 10 countries: Australia, France, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK and the US. They represented 16 industries: aerospace and defence, business services, consumer packaged goods, education, financial services, government, healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, technology, media, oil/gas, retail/wholesale, telecom, transportation/logistics, and utilities.