A survey of 500 engineering and software development professionals in the U.S. suggests more DevOps teams than ever need to resolve to embrace automation at a deeper level in the new year.
The survey, sponsored by Chronosphere, a provider of an observability platform, found engineers spend, on average, more than 10 hours per week attempting to triage and understand incidents. That equates to a quarter of a 40-hour workweek.
Overall, 96% of respondents said they spend most of their time resolving low-level issues, with 88% reporting that amount of time negatively impacts them and their careers because so much time is spent troubleshooting IT issues.
Over a third (33%) said those issues disrupted their personal life with 39% of respondents admitting they are frequently stressed out. Just under a quarter (22%) said they want to quit.
Chronosphere CEO Martin Mao said much of the stress DevOps teams encounter results from reliance on DevOps platforms that organizations built themselves. Platforms built and supported by a vendor today typically provide higher levels of automation that reduce overall stress levels, he added.
The survey found that 40% of respondents frequently get alerts from their observability solution without enough context to triage the incident. A total of 59% said half of the incident alerts they receive from their current observability solution aren’t actually helpful or usable, with 49% reporting they struggled with inconsistent performance using their current approach to observability. Nearly half (45%) said their current observability solution requires a lot of manual time and labor.
Overall, 42% of those using a vendor solution said they experienced high-severity incidents quarterly or more compared to 61% relying on a platform they built. Among organizations not using a vendor solution, the majority said they would consider doing so to enhance team productivity (61%) or improve reliability (54%).
Stress levels are likely to increase as organizations deploy emerging cloud-native applications. A full 87% of respondents said cloud-native architectures had increased the complexity of discovering and troubleshooting incidents.
During challenging economic times, it’s more critical for DevOps leaders to understand the total cost of building and maintaining platforms, said Mao. Many organizations decided to build their own platform at a time when there was no other viable option. The manual processes required to support those platforms result in a higher cost of labor that impedes the ability to scale workflows cost-effectively, he noted.
It’s not clear how big an appetite for change any organization that has built their own DevOps platforms may have in 2023. The challenge is that the initial cost of swapping in a commercial platform may appear high given the fact that the legacy platform is already deployed. However, the cost of the acquisition of a new platform needs to be weighed against the total cost of ongoing operations. A lot of soft costs show up in, for example, higher turnover rates for DevOps professionals that are likely to find a more rewarding job elsewhere that is less tedious. One way or another, at the start of 2023, it’s apparent there are more hard DevOps questions than ever that need to be asked and answered.