In the fast-paced world of technology, observability into the software applications that run the products and services that businesses deliver to their customers is critical for business success. But as many organizations pursue improved monitoring and observability solutions, they encounter the challenge of fragmentation across data, tools and teams. According to the 2022 Observability Forecast, these challenges aren’t just problems that engineering teams need to solve — these are business problems.

Observability is a way to check how well a system is working and spot any problems or issues by looking at the information it shares as external outputs. This information, also known as telemetry data, includes metrics, events, logs and traces (also known as MELT). By using this data effectively, you can make informed, data-driven decisions and take the right actions to fix any issues. It’s ideal to find mistakes before going to production, so observability is for both the developer and operations side of DevOps teams.

And observability reaches beyond DevOps. Whether you’re an engineer developing a system, an SRE ensuring it’s running optimally, or on the business side providing teams with resources to build products that meet customer needs, you face the challenge of managing a complicated mix of data and tools required to keep your systems secure and running smoothly.

According to the 2022 global survey of 1,614 technology professionals, the state of observability is often characterized by using multiple tools, incomplete coverage of the entire tech stack, and various complex data streams and systems to coordinate. There’s also a pattern of relying on manual effort and the reactive approach of incident tickets to detect problems. Respondents revealed room for improvement in outage frequency and the time to detect and resolve issues.