Nobl9, the service level observability company, announced The State of Service Level
Objectives (SLOs) 2023, a survey of more than 300 IT professionals and executives
conducted with Dimensional Research. As SLOs grow in popularity their usage is
becoming more mature. For example, 82 percent of respondents intend to increase
their use of SLOs, and 96 percent have mapped SLOs directly to their business
operations or already have a plan to. Results are also becoming quantitative
with 95 percent of respondents indicating that SLOs help them make better
business decisions with 27 percent of companies stating that SLOs have saved
them $500,000 or more.
"It
was incredibly impressive to see the year over year growth in the market and
the consistency of responses from our survey last year," said Marcin Kurc,
co-founder and CEO, Nobl9. "The responses align with what we are seeing in the
market. Enterprises across all industries are increasing their focus on system
reliability to ensure customer experience, and doing this by finding new ways
to leverage their new and legacy monitoring and observability tools. SLOs are
becoming an essential way to increase operational efficiency and improve
business processes."
SLO Adoption Drives Business
Companies
use observability tools to provide visibility and enable key functions such as
security, operational efficiency, capacity planning, customer support, and
increase development velocity. As code comes together from more sources --
open source, AI-generated, commercial solutions, and systems integrators, the typical applications,
databases, and networks, and into cloud and container environments,
microservices, and the developer pipeline - something barely half of companies
can do today. With the plethora of fragmented tools - 72 percent responded
that more than six observability tools - companies need to gain visibility not
by consolidation that would hurt productivity, but by creating consistent
definitions of reliability and expectations for various services.
Sixty-nine
percent of companies responding had adopted SLOs for the first time or are
expanding their use - which is consistent with the 2022 survey. Of the 72 percent of respondents
not using SLOs today, 54 percent plan on adopting them in the next 18 months
for the results seen in the survey.
SLOs Improving
Operational Efficiency and Customer Experiences with Monitoring and
Observability Tools
"The survey
responses are indicative of the broader trends we are seeing in the market
around companies focusing on operational efficiency and business agility," said
Stephen Elliott, Group Vice President, I&O, Cloud Operations and DevOps,
IDC. "The pandemic drove more companies to the cloud, and with that, we have
identified observability and monitoring to be key areas of focus. SLOs are one
way for companies to manage their resources and get the most out of them."
Key findings from
survey respondents show:
- 80 percent indicate an increased focus on system reliability due to
the pandemic driving cloud adoption, remote workers and supply chain
issues.
- 94 percent
state they are doing system reliability engineering, with most tasks being
assigned to IT operations.
- The ways
companies are using monitoring and observability tools is increasing. More
than 13 initiatives rely on monitoring and reliability with the most
common being security, operations performance (uptime, performance,
efficiency) and capacity planning.
- Respondents
identified 10 areas that require monitoring beyond networks, applications
and databases, but most lack visibility, and the number is expected to
grow.
- 72 percent
of companies use six or more monitoring and observability tools.
- 76 percent prevented business interruptions using SLOs - but 9
percent haven't implemented thresholds yet.
All
respondents had observability and monitoring responsibilities, and were IT
professionals and executives at medium to large enterprise companies
representing all seniority levels. Participants represented dozens of countries
from five continents providing a global market
perspective.