And the Killer App for Observability is…Integrations

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of a series of blog posts previewing our State of Observability 2024 survey report.

So far in this blog series, we’ve looked at where enterprises and MSPs are in their observability journeys and the benefits and challenges of their observability deployments. This week, we look at whether the observability story so far is more about replacing or enhancing existing IT management tools.

NPM Must Go

First we asked our survey participants what solutions they were looking to replace or have replaced with observability tools. The clear winner was network performance management, at 67%.

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This didn’t really surprise us. Legacy NPM tools are notoriously reactive and prone to generating alert fatigue. Network observability can provide a more holistic view of network performance by looking at the data network devices generate, like logs and traces. While we might expect to see similar benefits from observability solutions over other IT management tools, the network touches everything, from the edge to the cloud to internal devices. So prioritizing NPM in tools consolidation strategies is a smart move.

Don’t Just Replace, Integrate!

But observability adoption isn’t just about replacing legacy IT management tools. Our survey respondents were even more enthusiastic about integrating their new observability tools with their existing IT monitoring stack. When we asked our respondents what they’ve integrated plan to integrate with their observability tools, 80% of respondents checked off IT monitoring.

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Recall that when we asked about the benefits organizations were seeing from their observability tools, the top two choices were “Ability to discover performance issues we didn’t realize we had” (59%) and “Ability to detect and respond to performance issues before users/customers are impacted” (58%). There’s been a lot of discussion over the last decade about the differences between observability and monitoring. To IT organizations, it’s not an either/or scenario. Observability brings new data sources and new visibility that helps monitoring tools work better.

The Most Critical Capability for Observability is the Integrations it Supports

Later in the survey, we asked our respondents which capabilities are critical to have in an observability solution, inviting them to rate each capability on a scale of 1 to 5. The clear winner was Integrations, which we defined as “seamless integrations with other essential systems and tools in your tech stack.” Once again, our survey respondents made clear that they want their observability tools or any observability tools they’re planning to adopt to play nice with their existing IT management stack.

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In next week’s fourth and final installment of this blog series, we’ll look at the observability data types that are most important to ITOps teams as well as their adoption of modern application architectures.