A survey of 750 IT practitioners and leaders published today finds that while nearly two thirds (74%) have adopted monitoring and observability tools, a full 77% said lack of visibility into both in-premises and cloud computing environments remains an issue, with 37% describing it as a major issue for their IT teams.
Conducted by the market research firm UserEvidence on behalf of SolarWinds, the survey also finds three quarters of respondents (75%) reporting a lack of coordination or cooperation between different teams is an observability challenge.
Overall, the survey identifies cloud infrastructure (67%), networking (58%), security and compliance (56%) and database performance (51%) as the top areas that increased observability would improve.
At this point, most IT teams are using a mix of tools to both monitor pre-defined metrics and analyze specific IT incidents. Initially adopted by DevOps teams, observability tools and platforms are now being used more widely to analyze everything from application performance to cybersecurity incidents.
In fact, the survey finds that most IT teams have too many tools and platforms. More than half of respondents (55%) said their organization is using too many different monitoring and observability tools today. In addition, monitoring and observability tools and platforms, IT teams are also employing automation/orchestration tools (58%), IT service management (ITSM)/ticketing systems (54%), on-call alerting systems (51%) and custom scripts or some other type of internal tool (40%).
On top of that, IT teams are also embracing artificial intelligence (AI), with half (50%) reporting they have fully implemented IT across most monitoring use cases. Another third (33%) are piloting AI tools and platforms.
The most common use cases for AI are automating incident prioritization (47%), assisting with root cause analysis (45%), predicting capacity or performance issues (45%) and reducing alert noise and fatigue (45%). Top AI challenges include security concerns (47%), skills gaps (42%), complexity (41%), employee reluctance or resistance (37%) and budget constraints (33%), the survey finds.
Cullen Childress, chief product officer for SolarWinds, said that as IT management continues to evolve it has already become apparent there will be a need for a control plane through which IT teams will be able to manage what will soon be a fleet of AI agents that have been trained to automate specific tasks. Most of those AI agents will be invoking monitoring and observability platforms to determine what actions to perform based on the telemetry data that an IT team is able to aggregate, he added.
Ultimately, the goal is to not only make it simpler to manage IT environments at higher levels of scale, but also increase resiliency. Unfortunately, only a third of survey respondents (33%) described their current IT environment as being very resilient even though two-thirds (66%) said their incident response plan is integrated with their monitoring and observability tools.
Hopefully, there will come a day when the level of confidence IT teams have in their ability to manage their environments will be substantially higher than it is today. In the meantime, however, those IT environments are likely to become a little more complicated to manage as the number and types of workloads being deployed continues to expand.
