Guest: Peter Pezaris (LinkedIn)
Company: New Relic (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

New Relic has announced its findings from the 2023 Observability Forecast report. This is the third consecutive year the company has conducted the study, which aims to uncover the current observability trends, key challenges and pain points the respondents are experiencing, and to shed light on what the future of observability may hold.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Peter Pezaris, Chief Strategy and Design Officer at New Relic, discusses the company’s findings from the third annual Observability Forecast report. He goes on to explain how New Relic is helping companies in their observability journey and what sets them apart from their competitors.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Pezaris talks about the evolution of observability over the years saying that was one of the key reasons they did the study so that they could better understand how observability practices have changed and what the current trends are.
• New Relic’s data was gathered from 1700 IT professionals across 15 different countries. Pezaris talks us through the key findings such as that those implementing and maturing their observability practice have fewer outages that cost the companies less. He tells us that the median outage cost per year for the respondents is $7.75 million but for those with full stack observability experience, the median outage costs 37% less than the average.
• New Relic defines fullstack observability as having all five elements of your technology stack monitored, yet 67% of the respondents still have not achieved this. Pezaris explains that this is the second most important technology spend after their cloud service provider though, indicating that it is a priority for them.
• Pezaris tells us that tool fragmentation still exists even though the data shows the number of different observability vendors they are using is decreasing. However, the respondents would prefer to have a single consolidated platform.
• New Relic is helping customers deal with the complexity of observability by providing an all-in-one platform which gives you access to all New Relic’s capabilities unlike competitors who sell individual capability as different SKUs. Secondly, New Relic has a unified data platform which helps provide a better overall customer experience and reduce friction with troubleshooting capabilities.
• Pezaris explains how even though smaller companies may be more nimble and can change their roadmap quickly. New Relic’s platform capabilities help them keep up with the pace of the industry and to build products and deliver value to customers.
• New Relic leverages generative AI in three key ways: to help individual employees get better work done, embedding generative AI into their product experience, such as in the GenAI assistant, Grok. Thirdly, in helping other companies embrace generative AI through New Relic’s AI and ML observability capabilities.
• Pezaris shares his thoughts on what the future holds for observability based on the key findings from the report. He tells us that 82% of respondents expect to deploy each of the 17 different observability capabilities that New Relic defines in the report by 2026. In addition to this, companies who have an existing observability investment are seeing a 2x ROI.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.