The State of Observability in Communications and Media
We surveyed ITOps and engineering professionals worldwide to learn how organizations are building a leading observability practice.
Here, we highlight key findings from respondents in the communications and media industry.
The view is worth the climb
With communications and media organizations in a constant state of network buildout and new service activity, data growth is inevitable. So it’s no surprise that more data brings new challenges for comms and media organizations. Our research revealed these top trouble spots:
- 50% struggle with alert fatigue
- 34% find it hard to correlate data from fragmented sources
- 32% have limited visibility into legacy application environments
Organizations can rise above these challenges by embracing observability. With communications and media companies seeing a 2.5x annual return on investment, the future of observability in the industry looks promising.
Leading observability practices aren’t born — they’re built
Being an observability leader pays off in a big way. Our data reveals leaders experience greater success in nearly every area — innovation, speed, resilience, and more.
Our research found that 10% of communications and media organizations are leaders in observability. Forty percent (40%) of respondents are still in the beginning stages.
Comms and media organizations are investing to continue the momentum. More than half (54%) plan a significant increase in observability spending (higher than the industry average of 40%).
Communications and media organizations are seeing success with observability:
45% report significantly better visibility across application architectures
35% have a formal approach to digital resilience
Communications and media organizations are creating a flexible future with telemetry data
Vast amounts of telemetry data can overwhelm teams and make it hard to prioritize action. But many communications and media organizations are bringing order to the chaos with OpenTelemetry (OTel).
In fact, comms and media organizations are leading the charge, with 68% reporting that their primary observability tool leverages OTel — the highest of all industries.
The platform engineering revolution is here
As more organizations embrace platform engineering to help reduce complexity, improve collaboration, and enhance scalability, they’re also freeing up more time to focus on innovation.
A significant majority (75%) of comms and media organizations have a dedicated platform engineering team.
Almost all (92%) of respondents have been very successful in driving adoption of standards across the organization, specifically for security and compliance guardrails and controls.
Adopters are seeing the benefits:
- 52% cite increased IT operations efficiency
- 43% have optimized infrastructure for emerging workloads like AI and machine learning (ML)
- 40% report increased developer productivity/efficiency
AI in observability is starting to take shape
Using AI and ML within observability tools has become table stakes. Currently, comms and media organizations are using AIOps to assist with:
- Determining root cause (49%)
- Forecasting metrics/KPIs (46%)
- Correlating data across different source types (46%)
Another positive sign — 80% of comms and media respondents say ROI from AIOps tools has exceeded expectations, compared to 57% in Splunk’s State of Observability 2023 findings.
97% of communications and media organizations are exploring generative AI in observability
68% are exploring its use for data analysis
17% have fully adopted these capabilities
