Grafana Labs has announced the findings from the Grafana Labs Observability Survey 2023, revealing that 52% of companies are currently using six or more observability tools, leading tool sprawl and data source overload to become key challenges. 

With this, 11% of respondents stated that they are using sixteen or more different observability tools in their organizations. 

It was also revealed that the number of data sources has a correlation to the size of an organization. 41% of companies with over 1,000 employees pull in more than ten data sources while only 7% of companies with 100 or fewer employees reported pulling in that many data sources. 

According to the survey, the industries currently leading observability tools usage are financial services (31% use 10 or more tools) and government (27% use 10 or more tools).

To fight against this challenge of tool sprawl, 70% of companies said that their company’s have centralized observability, and 83% of those companies reported that, as a result, they have saved both time and money.

The survey also showed that organizations are utilizing a wide range of observability tools. With 94% and 79% respectively, Grafana and Prometheus were shown to be the most commonly used tools, indicating a rise in Kubernetes usage. 

Respondents also cited using Elastic (44%), Splunk (22%), and Datadog (19%), as well as still emerging tools such as Grafana Loki (44%).

Almost one-third of organizations also said that they have not yet centralized observability, however, this adoption varies across industries. 70% of financial sector companies surveyed said they have adopted centralized observability, compared to 58% across all sectors.

Different companies were also shown to have different observability strategies. According to the survey, 37% say they prioritize capacity planning when correlating data, 25% prioritize cost control, and 9% prioritize profitability and margin calculation.

Click here to read the full report.