ROI from Observability and Monitoring Initiatives Not Keeping Pace with Rising Costs

Survey: 84 Percent of DevOps and SRE Professionals Report They Are Paying More Than They Should, Even When They Limit Log Data

SEATTLE, Sept. 14, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Log data volumes have increased an average of five-fold over the past three years. As a byproduct, observability and monitoring platforms are becoming prohibitively expensive. According to 84 percent of U.S.-based DevOps and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) professionals, observability initiatives are falling short on delivering the ROI they should be.

This is a key finding in a newly released survey conducted by Edge Delta, a leading observability provider that uniquely processes data as it's collected at the source – not after it's been centralized in a premium data store. The survey also reports that over four out of five professionals believe that they are paying too much for observability even when they limit data ingestion.

"There needs to be a better way for companies to effectively keep an eye on all their data, while avoiding exorbitant storage expenditures. Organizations should no longer be forced to make this unacceptable compromise," says Ozan Unlu, CEO, Edge Delta. "Given that data growth is not going to slow any time soon, a fundamental paradigm shift is badly needed, and that is the role that Edge Delta is providing."

The problem is that when companies ingest all their data into traditional observability and monitoring platforms, cloud data storage costs often spiral out of control. In fact, 93 percent of respondents noted they experience overages or unexpected spikes in observability costs at least a few times per quarter, if not more. 93 percent also report their company's leadership are "somewhat or very aware" of these rising costs, with 91 percent of respondents believing that as a result, observability and monitoring costs will face more scrutiny over the next year.

Moreover, the vast majority of businesses (98 percent) attempt to remedy this issue by limiting the logs ingested by the observability platform. "Unfortunately, the consequences of this 'data down the drain' approach can be severe, including increased risk or compliance challenges; losing out on valuable insights and analytics, and failure to detect a production issue or outage," continues Unlu. In fact, these concerns are resulting in internal tensions with 83 percent of respondents reporting internal company disputes over what data is kept and what is discarded.

Methodology: The Edge Delta survey was conducted by Wakefield Research (www.wakefieldresearch.com) among 200 Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps professionals at companies with between $50m and $500m+ in annual revenue, with a quota of at least 100 who are decision-makers/buyers of observability and monitoring tools, at least 100 who monitor a customer-facing application with their observability tool, and at least 100 who use Kubernetes, between June 27 and July 6, 2023, using an email invitation and an online survey. The full survey report can be accessed here.

About Edge Delta

Edge Delta is a new way to do observability. We process your data as it's created and give you the freedom to route it anywhere. Make observability costs predictable, surface the most useful insights, and shape your data however you need.

SOURCE Edge Delta