A survey commissioned by New Relic and conducted by market research firm Vanson Bourne found a strong correlation between mature DevOps practices and progress on digital business transformation initiatives. The findings were revealed at New Relic’s FutureStack conference and drew on responses from 750 senior IT decision-makers at enterprises with 500 to 5,000-plus employees across Australia, France, Germany, the UK, and the United States.
Key Survey Findings at a Glance
- Roughly 50% of U.S. organizations surveyed had either completed or were close to completing their digital transformation journeys.
- Nearly two-thirds of U.S. respondents reported adopting DevOps practices—consistent with the transformation progress seen in the same cohort.
- 79% said the wider business holds higher expectations for how digital systems perform.
- 72% said their technology teams are expected to deliver more innovations and updates than ever before.
- 89% believe artificial intelligence and machine learning will become important tools for managing digital systems.
The Observability Gap: Too Much Data, Too Little Insight
One of the central themes to emerge from the survey is what might be called an observability gap—the disconnect between the volume of data DevOps teams collect and their ability to act on it meaningfully.
Buddy Brewer, then Group Vice President and General Manager for Client-Side Analytics at New Relic, pointed out that most DevOps teams have access to a wide range of metrics but that those metrics typically describe averages—how many times an event occurs across the entire user population. The problem, he noted, is that averages obscure the experience of the worst-affected users, who are often a company’s most important customers.
The survey data backs this up:
- More than 50% of respondents said their complex new software and infrastructure is difficult to manage and monitor for performance issues.
- 56% acknowledged that it is impossible to properly assess all the machine data being collected.
- 48% admitted that end users or customers are likely to report a problem before the internal team is aware of it.
- 46% said they are notified of issues before they know how to fix them.
Together, these figures paint a picture of teams that are data-rich but insight-poor—a significant liability when business stakeholders expect near-real-time visibility into system health.
Business Pressure Is Intensifying
The survey also documented the organisational pressure bearing down on engineering and operations teams as transformation initiatives accelerate:
- 63% said they work longer hours to observe and manage software performance because of pressure to respond to business needs.
- 46% reported that C-suite executives want daily updates on how software systems are performing.
- 40% said CEOs demand more answers when outages or performance problems occur.
- A third of respondents said they are challenged to demonstrate business benefit metrics for their digital transformation projects.
These findings highlight a communication gap between engineering teams and executive leadership—one that monitoring and observability tooling alone cannot fully close without investment in dashboards, SLO reporting, and structured incident retrospectives that non-technical leaders can understand.
Top Five Digital Transformation Challenges
The survey identified five leading obstacles organisations face when pursuing digital transformation:
- Uneven pace of change — Separate parts of the organisation move at different speeds to embrace digital transformation, creating internal friction and integration bottlenecks.
- Skills shortages — A lack of employees with the technical skills needed to execute transformation at scale remains a persistent constraint.
- Budget restrictions — Limited funding slows modernisation efforts, particularly for infrastructure and tooling upgrades.
- Measuring business benefits — Organisations struggle to define and quantify the ROI of transformation projects in terms that resonate with business leadership.
- Legacy system inertia — Continued resistance to decommissioning legacy systems extends technical debt and complicates migration to modern architectures.
What This Means for DevOps Teams
The survey’s central takeaway is that DevOps adoption and digital transformation tend to travel together—but adoption alone does not guarantee smooth execution. The data suggests three practical areas where DevOps teams can improve outcomes:
- Shift from average-based to percentile-based monitoring. Tracking p95 and p99 latency and error rates surfaces problems that affect a small but critical segment of users—often before those users escalate to support channels.
- Invest in business-facing observability. Connecting technical metrics to business KPIs (conversion rates, revenue impact, SLA breaches) makes it easier to justify budgets and satisfy C-suite reporting requirements.
- Build cross-functional transformation alignment. The finding that different parts of the organisation move at different speeds underscores the need for platform teams to provide self-service tooling that enables product and application teams to move faster without creating new reliability risks.
Looking Ahead: AI and ML in DevOps
The survey’s most optimistic data point is that 89% of respondents believe AI and machine learning will become important elements for managing digital systems. AIOps—using machine learning to correlate events, detect anomalies, and reduce alert noise—is an active area of development across observability platforms. However, as of this survey’s publication, most organisations were still in early stages of applying these capabilities at scale.
Until AI-driven operations mature, DevOps teams should expect that each new digital transformation project will bring a corresponding increase in operational complexity, monitoring surface area, and on-call burden. Planning for that growth explicitly—through runbooks, automated remediation, and clearly defined SLOs—remains the most reliable path forward.
Source: Original reporting via devops.com, based on a New Relic/Vanson Bourne survey presented at FutureStack (2019). Survey methodology: 750 senior IT decision-makers, enterprises with 500–5,000+ employees, across Australia, France, Germany, UK, and the US.