Executive Summary
Almost every business depends on its IT systems. For some organizations, digital is the only way they conduct their business. For all of those enterprises, their business resilience depends on their IT resilience. Consequently, IT and digital operations have become a critical part of every enterprise. Over the last few years, CxOs and their boards of directors have provided the necessary political and financial support to enable business survival by expanding budgets, showing empathy for IT staff, and increasing hiring. But now they are cost-cutting.
Given the explosion in IT operations (ITOps) data growth, enterprises are struggling with legacy observability tools, cost overruns, and overworked ITOps and system reliability engineering (SRE) teams. Combined with IT budget cutbacks and the necessity to deploy newer innovative projects such as generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to the field faster than the competition, this is adding a lot of pressure on ITOps teams.
Especially with the need and demand for “always on,” there are more opportunities than ever for things to break, and incidents do not wait for a convenient time. Problems can, and often do, happen on weekends, holidays, or weeknights, when no one is paying attention. To be properly prepared when an incident happens, an enterprise must be in the position to immediately identify, assess, manage, solve, and effectively communicate the situation to customers, stakeholders, and (for major incidents) senior management.
The time has come for IT leaders to reimagine their IT and make it more efficient. But to get visibility into systems, an enterprise needs to be able to observe its IT systems 24/7 and get proactive notifications and resolution, regardless of the location. Comprehensive observability, across the full stack, was more of a myth and vendor fluff than a possibility—until now. Given recent advancements in GenAI, AI, and machine learning (ML) along with cloud-native monitoring, logging, and tracing solutions, it has become more of a reality.
This report outlines the primary observability management trends Constellation Research has observed for 2025 and beyond, based on conversations with IT executives in enterprises that successfully and easily manage major digital incidents and have full-on visibility into their systems all the time. Effectively managing major incidents with ease lets your customers know you are prepared for them and can handle situations in the future, instilling confidence in your offerings and brand.
