A new report from infrastructure monitoring startup Logz.io Inc. finds that production issues for DevOps teams are taking longer to solve despite advancements in observability.

The finding comes from the company’s fifth annual DevOps Pulse 2022 Report, which analyzed key trends, points of interest and challenges experienced through a survey of more than 1,000 engineers.

Respondents to the survey consistently reported increasing complexity across their cloud environments. The complexity was driven by expanding microservices architecture and the proliferation and complexity of observability tools themselves. The result means that DevOps teams, which combine application developers and information technology operations staff, struggle to maintain clear visibility, quickly resolve production issues and manage related monitoring costs.

Despite the advancement and maturity of observability systems, 64% of respondents reported an average mean time to report of over an hour, compared with 47% who reported a similar time in 2021. Some 36% said that they were able to resolve production issues within an hour on average, compared with 53% last year.  The report claims the trend is being driven by factors ranging from growing cloud data volumes and systems complexity to issues of observability tool sprawl, as well as the need for greater expertise among DevOps teams.

Observability costs and data volumes were found to be growing concerns, with 27% of respondents ranking total cost of ownership and the large volumes of data being ingested into the tools among their main challenges in maintaining effective observability. More than three-quarters of respondents rated their efforts over three on a scale of one to five when asked to indicate how extensive and mature their observability strategy has become.

Cost alone was not the only issue with observability tool sprawl also identified as a problem. Ab0ut 22% of those surveyed indicated their organization uses five or more observability tools, compared with 11% last year.

Open-source capabilities are widely used by 90% of respondents. Open source is the most common way to deploy observability. Shared services models were found to be growing in popularity, with more than 85% of respondents indicating that their organizations operate using a shared services observability model. In such models, a central team is responsible for implementing and maintaining tooling for other stakeholders such as app developers, site reliability engineers and DevOps teams.

Data security has also moved to the forefront of DevOps teams’ priorities, with 33% identifying it as a primary observability challenge. “As practices and implementations expand, organizations are becoming more concerned about the impact of data volumes on production quality and cost,” Tomer Levy, chief executive officer of Logz.io, said in a statement.

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