SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2023: Lessons From Observability Leaders Survey

The very first internet connection occurred in 1969. Charley Kline typed a short message from his computer at UCLA to Bill Duvall’s computer at Stanford Research Institute, in a scene reminiscent of Alexander Graham Bell’s exchange with Thomas Watson nearly 100 years before. He got two characters in (the “L” and “O” of “login”) before the system crashed, causing the world’s first internet outage.

Nearly half a century later, the industry continues to see high-profile digital services outages from major players (like Microsoft^®, AWS^®, Instagram^®, and others). Turns out, assuring digital end-to-end services is hard—really hard. This explains why Gartner^® included “observability” in its famous Hype Cycle™ in 2022. The fact is, IT environments are now too complex for humans to manage alone. Observability tools have emerged as a solution for achieving optimal performance, compliance, and resilience in digital environments. In essence, observability provides visibility across your network, infrastructure, systems, application, database, digital experience, and log monitoring—all in one end-to-end solution.

Observability also goes a step beyond monitoring, using cross-domain data correlation, machine learning, and AIOps to provide actionable business insights needed to identify and remediate issues in real time. In other words, the value is right there in the name: observability enhances your ability to observe your digital ecosystem with increased transparency, improved detection, and more intelligent insights. We’ve come a long way from Kline’s dorm-room computing. Today’s enterprise landscape s more complex than ever before, with development cycles happening at unprecedented speeds and an increased focus on performance, security, and customer experience.

Observability is a crucial tool for IT, DevOps, and SecOps teams—but how is the adoption process going? SolarWinds commissioned the 2023 IT Trends: Lessons From Observability Leaders Survey to find out.