Come and use the cloud, they said.
The first wave of cloud providers (remember Rackspace et al?) and the ensuing breed of hyperscaler Cloud Services Providers (CSPs) that we know as the ‘big three’ (with a selection pack of would-be contenders lying in waiting) have and still do extol the ease-of-use and flexibility of cloud as key benefits that should convince any organization to embrace virtual abstraction.
But in reality, it’s typically not a plug-and-play affair.
A recent report suggests that some 67% of engineers note that a strong observability function provides the foundation for business value in a cloud-native world, but they still struggle with greater complexity, inconsistent performance and a general presence of data deluge.
The summary here points to a figure suggesting that engineers waste as much as 25% of their work week on low-level troubleshooting tasks, costing US and international businesses billions each year.
The company behind these ‘findings’ (and let’s remember that all technology surveys are conducted with a design to deliver a payload of results that fall in line and attempt to validate with the central technology proposition of the IT vendor behind them) is Chronosphere, a cloud-native observability platform specialist.
The 2023 Cloud Native Observability Report: Overcoming Cloud Native Complexity report is based on a survey of 500+ full-time employees in engineering and software development roles who are familiar with observability tools and practices.
It suggests that when observability is done right, it positively impacts both the top and bottom lines of a business, allowing organizations to innovate faster, improve customer experience and increase return on investment.
Conversely, when companies’ observability functions fall short, the results can be catastrophic – amounting to billions of dollars in lost productivity across the US every year. The research shows that engineering and DevOps productivity falters – wasting an average of 10 hours or 25% of their time every week trying to triage and understand incidents.
It’s a cloud-native world (after all)
As the market increasingly moves toward cloud-native environments, observability must adapt as well if it is to deliver as promised: effective cloud-native observability leads to better business outcomes by mitigating incidents that cause customer pain, helps teams innovate faster and improves ROI on precious engineering time.
In addition to the technical benefits observability brings – like remediating issues before they negatively impact customers – it also provides higher-level business impact.
“These findings reflect a trend we’ve seen in our customer base for several years – that old school approaches and tools are failing businesses.” said Chronosphere co-founder and CEO, Martin Mao. “During today’s economic uncertainty, companies will gravitate towards solutions that drive engineering efficiency and cost savings while continuing to enable rapid innovation cycles – and this is especially true for companies moving to cloud-native who need to revisit their observability strategy and solutions.”
For engineers, not all observability tools are created equal, as companies often choose between vendor solutions or building their own. The report found that those using vendor solutions were three times as satisfied and ultimately, more effective, than those using tools they’ve built.
Those using a vendor solution are detecting issues 65% faster than those without a cohesive approach and 30% faster than those with an in-house solution. As many as 42% of those using a vendor solution said they experienced very severe, customer-facing incidents quarterly or more; much less than the 61% using only their own observability solution who experience incidents quarterly.
Low-level lethargy
Few engineers are fully satisfied with their current observability solution, saying it’s too slow, lacks context and is stifling their performance and ability to contribute meaningfully to the business. In fact, 96% of individual contributors spend most of their time resolving low-level issues but say what they really want to do is innovate. These factors, on top of companies being forced to run leaner teams, have stretched engineers to the limits.
Notably, the survey showed that senior engineering leaders are often unaware of the plights of their teams, with more than twice as many individual contributors than senior leaders saying they are frequently stressed (45% of individual contributors vs. 20% of directors).
Nearly all of the individual contributors surveyed have complaints about their observability solutions compared with only 12% of senior leaders. This ‘corporate digital divide’ is not only costing companies customers and revenue, but also talented engineers who flee organizations because their voices aren’t being heard.
About Adrian Bridgwater
Adrian Bridgwater is a freelance journalist and corporate content creation specialist focusing on cross platform software application development as well as all related aspects software engineering, project management and technology as a whole. Adrian is a regular writer and blogger with Computer Weekly and others covering the application development landscape to detail the movers, shakers and start-ups that make the industry the vibrant place that it is. His journalistic creed is to bring forward-thinking, impartial, technology editorial to a professional (and hobbyist) software audience around the world. His mission is to objectively inform, educate and challenge - and through this champion better coding capabilities and ultimately better software engineering.