According to the latest cloud native observability microsurvey, three CNCF observability projects are leading the way in terms of adoption. Prometheus is the most used project, adopted by 86% of respondents and their organizations for event monitoring and alerting. OpenTelemetry, a set of tools, APIs, and SDKs to instrument, generate, collect and export data to analyze the performance and behavior of cloud native software and systems, is used by 49%. Third is Fluentd, which delivers a unified logging layer, used by 46%.

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently partnered with the CNCF Observability Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to conduct the microsurvey of the cloud native community at the end of 2021 to find out how organizations use observability tools.

According to the report, the desire to achieve the expected benefits of cloud has seen growing interest in a concept known as observability. This is a way to determine the health of an application, workload, or system so you can act to secure and maintain performance and availability. Observability constructed on cloud native principles, architectures, and technologies, is the best route to ensuring performance and availability.

On being asked what practical, technical, or cultural challenges participants had experienced, or that they foresee experiencing, in using the cloud native observability projects, the biggest challenge experienced or expected was complexity, or being too difficult to understand or run (41%). Lack of supporting documentation – materials that would help DevOps teams to build, implement, maintain and operate systems for observability using these projects as part of their long-term infrastructure – came second on the list of challenges (36%).

Rounding off the top three was concern over whether projects might be abandoned or become inactive – an issue for 26% of respondents.

There’s a huge array of observability tools but how are they being deployed? The overwhelming majority (64%) are self-managed on public cloud. Observability as a service on the public cloud was employed by 44% while 40% ran self-managed on prem.

Survey respondents also ranked their top priorities for the coming year. In an illustration of the newness of this field, 60% ranked development of best practices as number one. Four percentage points behind came equipping engineers with the tools and data to help them identify and solve issues to maintain system health. The third biggest priority for respondents was to establish a single, unified view of their technology stack (53%).