4 Unexpected Costs of Unreliable Observability
Sometimes it can be hard to know all the ways an adverse issue can cost your business — until it happens. Although your organization has likely mastered service downtime measurement — calculating lost revenue, customer satisfaction score (CSAT), customer churn and negative press — have you taken the time to understand the full spectrum of business costs incurred when your observability platform slows down or becomes unavailable?
When your observability platform isn’t working optimally, your team ends up flying blind with no visibility into your services. In turn, your business can quickly experience business and revenue interruption, lengthier troubleshooting time, increased engineering burnout and decreased customer satisfaction.
Here’s what your business needs to know to conquer the four big costs of unreliable observability tools.
Cloud Native Is Different
Technology environments are continually evolving. Moving to cloud native allows your business to be efficient and responsive in a digital world where customers expect fast transactions and always-on experiences. Your ability to monitor your environment needs to exceed the promise of your platform. Yet traditional infrastructure and monitoring systems — built for monitoring monolithic applications deployed on virtual machines (VMs) — fall short when it comes to the reliability and scale you and your team need to excel in today’s digital business world.
4 Big Ways Unreliable Observability Is (and Will Continue) Costing You
Business and Revenue Interruption
Even if your apps are up and running, you can’t fully operate your business when your observability platform is down. For example, when observability stops, audit trails can break. This means you can’t allow any transactions until your observability platform is back up. You also may have to tell your engineers to halt deployments until your observability platform is operational. In both cases, unreliable observability tooling costs you time and money.
Longer Troubleshooting Time
There are unexpected costs associated with keeping your environment going when your monitoring and observability platforms are experiencing a partial or complete outage. Troubleshooting takes longer because your engineers are chasing observability data from alternate sources. Your best engineers get pulled away from other important tasks to help manage through the outage. Also, permanent data loss isn’t out of the question, which could mean any trend analysis has missing data. Unreliable observability decreases the confidence in your observability tooling. Developers become hesitant to roll out new code — which slows deployments and the business.
Engineer Burnout
The human cost of observability downtime is real, resulting in burnout that negatively affects your top and bottom lines. Fixing downtime issues can lead to long hours, extended on-call shifts and growing frustration. Your company can lose its most valuable engineers due to burnout, and it is challenging to be constantly recruiting new engineers. Moreover, the burnout problem is rampant, according to Chronosphere’s 2023 Cloud Native Observability Report, which found that engineers spend 25% of their time (nearly a full business day out of the week) troubleshooting.
Customer Satisfaction
Customer dissatisfaction is perhaps the most tangible cost of unreliable observability. Today’s customers are savvy, impatient and have high expectations — a few minutes of performance deterioration can make them abandon a search, request or transaction — resulting in lost revenue. In the recent 2023 Online Reliability Report, 75% of respondents say frequent slowdowns or glitches will cause them to stop using an app or website. When your observability solution is slow or unavailable, you can miss an issue that negatively affects your customers. The key to customer experience is meeting SLAs, yet 99% of engineers in the 2023 Cloud Native Observability Report said they are missing their mean time to remediate) target.
How to Raise Your Observability Return on Investment (ROI)
A recent Forrester Research report revealed that a reliable observability solution can reduce severe incidents by 75% annually. Chronosphere, a single-tenant, Software as a Service (SaaS)-based cloud native observability platform, offers a 99.9% service-level agreement (SLA), yet it has delivered 99.99% across all customers in the past year.
In contrast to traditional infrastructure and monitoring tools, Chronosphere puts the right data in context, allowing your engineers to find what they need to quickly solve issues. This means organizations can eliminate business and revenue interruption, cut troubleshooting time and decrease engineering burnout while increasing customer satisfaction.
Calculate the ROI of using Chronosphere cloud native observability.
