Editor’s Note: This is the fourth and final installment of a series of blog posts previewing our State of Observability 2024 survey report. In last week’s episode of this blog series, we looked at whether observability is replacing or enhancing existing IT monitoring tools. This week, we’ll look at why metrics are the most important observability data type to ITOps teams and what's holding back tracing.

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of a series of blog posts previewing our State of Observability 2024 survey report. So far in this blog series, we’ve looked at where enterprises and MSPs are in their observability journeys and the benefits and challenges of their observability deployments. This week, we look at whether the observability story so far is more about replacing or enhancing existing IT management tools.

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of a series of blog posts previewing our State of Observability 2024 survey report. In the first episode of this blog series, we looked at where IT organizations are in their observability journeys and found, rather surprisingly, that most enterprise IT organizations and MSPs were just getting started in observability. Yet 96% of respondents told us their observability solution was delivering the value they expected.

For nearly a decade now, observability has been one of the hottest topics in IT operations. Borrowed from control theory in engineering, observability in IT operations means measuring a system’s performance by the data it generates, typically metrics, events, logs and traces.