Nature of the Opportunity: Why Business Observability?

To improve business results, you need to know how customers and employees are using your systems

Good observability is good digital business

Make money, save money, and manage risk with business observability

Make money. Create opportunities to increase revenue and improve market share through greater understanding of your digital business. Uncover unmet customer needs by partnering with innovation teams. Design, prototype, test, and deliver new business functionality quickly.

Save money. Spot existing problems and inefficiencies faster with greater business observability. Uncover the reasons for lack of adoption of business processes. Design technology to make employees more efficient. Notice underutilized infrastructure and retire obsolete applications.

Manage risk. Reduce the chances of compliance violations by having a clear view into how people are actually using systems, rather than hoping everyone adheres to policies.

[Source: The App Attention Index 2021]

Business results from case studies

Observability results show IT value, but business impact is harder to see

More and more businesses are seeing system observability’s benefits for IT. Many see a huge reduction in support tickets because technical issues are resolved by automation or never happen in the first place.

Forrester’s analysis of four Honeycomb customers goes deeper to estimate the business impacts of these IT improvements over a three-year span:

$1.9 million in new revenue through increased uptime, fewer outages, and better performance.
$2 million reduction in engineering labor costs through improved developer productivity, such as faster debugging.
$940,000 saved through lower engineer employee churn thanks to higher job satisfaction.

It is harder to quantify more direct business benefits. Faster solution development time should lead to faster time-to-value, which increases revenue and cuts costs. Fewer outages and better system performance should improve customer and employee experiences.

As organizations evolve their business observability practices, more data will emerge to show the direct business impacts.

[Source: The Total Economic Impact™ Of Honeycomb, Forrester]