Infrastructure, Cloud & DevOps

Distributed Cloud Series: Observability and Demystifying AIOps

August 22, 2023

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Jon Brown
Research Objectives

The need for observability in IT operations management is driven by the desire for organizations to reduce downtime, increase operational security, and improve customer, digital, and employee experiences. This is important because software, in many cases, contributes directly to an organization’s bottom line. In IT operations management, the addition of distributed and multi-cloud, cloud-native development and architectures as well as the increasing importance of security mean that the infrastructure is much more complex and significantly more dynamic. For software developers and DevOps teams, understanding the behavior of their code in production and integrated development environments empowers them to troubleshoot and deliver better-performing code and applications in less time. Against this backdrop, IT and DevOps teams are embracing observability and, to a lesser extent, AIOps to help them instrument and monitor their infrastructure and applications.

To determine the current state of observability and AIOps in modern organizations, Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 374 IT and DevOps/AppDev professionals in North America (US and Canada) responsible for evaluating, purchasing, building, and managing application infrastructure in their organization.

This study sought to answer the following questions:
- What percentage of organizations are using full-stack observability today? How many plan to implement?
- To what extent are organizations deploying observability across their environments?
- How many observability tools do organizations use to collect data from their environments?
- To what extent is observability tool sprawl adding complexity to environments?
- What third-party observability or monitoring tools are in use? Which are most valued by organizations?
- What are the most important organizational priorities for observability?
- What are the most impactful benefits delivered by observability and monitoring strategies?
- What are the biggest challenges or concerns when it comes to deploying observability solutions?
- What are the biggest challenges or concerns in using and supporting observability solutions?
- How are organizations planning to address challenges relating to observability data growth?
- What do organizations consider to be the most important observability tools currently in use?
- Which teams are making the final decisions around which observability tools are used?
- How confident are teams in the observability tools they are using across all stages of the application lifecycle (e.g., build, release, and operate)?
- What are the plans to invest in additional tools and services to support monitoring and observability strategies? Which tools or services are organizations targeting?
- What is the current and future adoption landscape for AIOps?
- Among organizations using AIOps, what benefits are delivered and how impactful are they?
- How important is AIOps in terms of overall observability strategies and future related plans?
- What are the barriers to AIOps adoption?
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.

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Activity Trends: What’s Driving Growth Across The TechTarget & BrightTALK Network

August 21, 2023

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Enterprise Strategy Group
About This Report

This report covers trending areas of interest across 240+ IT markets over the last 6 months (January 2023 – June 2023) in five (5) regions across the TechTarget & BrightTALK network: WW, NA, EMEA, APAC, LATAM.
- Top 20 markets driving activity
  - Represents the top 20 broad technology markets driving the most activity in the last 6 months. Activity data can help to show where audience research is growing or declining and therefore help reinforce which markets are hot or declining.
- 25 topic areas on the rise
  - Shows the top 25 granular topics growing the most across the TechTarget network in the last 6 months. This gives insight into the content areas that are on the rise right now.
Discover what’s trending on our network, which you can leverage to engage IT buyers in market now and improve marketing and sales effectiveness.

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Beyond the GenAI Hype: Real-world Investments, Use Cases, and Concerns

August 21, 2023

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Mike Leone
Research Objectives
- Determine the current market state of generative AI, including adoption and budget strategies.
- Identify current and planned GenAI use cases and prioritization across organizations.
- Understand key challenge areas with GenAI and investment requirements to address them.
- Investigate key areas of application and focus for GenAI technologies, including cybersecurity, application development, analytics, and customer experience. (more…)
Beyond the GenAI Hype: Real-world Investments, Use Cases, and Concerns

August 18, 2023

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Mike Leone
Research Objectives

While AI in general was already assimilating into the everyday business and IT lexicon thanks to ongoing AI and analytics strategies and initiatives, GenAI recently stormed the market and mindshare of decision makers across industries and major geographic markets. Business leaders see a massive opportunity to positively impact operations and customer strategies with GenAI, but its adoption and use across all business units carry a fair share of trepidation.

Most organizations are aware of GenAI, and a rising percentage are currently formulating strategies to both harness the technology’s benefits and control its use to prevent data quality issues and information leaks. To assess the state of GenAI strategies and plans, TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 670 IT professionals and business decision makers in North America (65%), EMEA (18%), APAC (16%), and LATAM (2%) involved with generative AI initiatives in their organization. This study sought to answer the following questions:
- What is the status of GenAI initiatives within organizations?
- How are organizations using, or planning use, large language models (LLMs) to support GenAI initiatives?
- Are organizations allocating, or planning to allocate, budget to support GenAI initiatives? If so, what is the percentage of IT budgets allocated to GenAI?
- In which lines of business are organizations currently applying GenAI? Moving forward, which of these areas will benefit most from the use of GenAI?
- Which teams or stakeholders actively contribute to shaping GenAI initiatives in organizations?
- What technology investments are needed to support GenAI initiatives?
- What do organizations identify as the primary benefits of using GenAI in their environments?
- What are the most prioritized use cases for GenAI, particularly in environments where the technology is applied across multiple areas?
- What are the biggest challenges organizations face in GenAI implementations?
- In which areas do organizations feel they need to invest (time and/or money) to support the use of GenAI?
- What type of third parties do organizations currently, or plan to, work with to support GenAI initiatives?
- Are organizations more or less likely to consider vendors that incorporate GenAI capabilities as part of their products or services?
- How much more, if at all, are organizations willing to pay for a product or service that uses GenAI versus a comparable product or service that does not use GenAI?
- What types of information or media would help organizations assess GenAI?
- For which application development use cases are organizations using, or planning to use, GenAI? What about use cases for security and customer experience (CX)? Where will investments be made?
- How do, or will, organizations ensure the security and privacy of data used in GenAI models?
- For which security use cases are organizations using, or planning to use, GenAI?
- Which areas of the analytics lifecycle will benefit most from the use of GenAI?
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries, including financial, manufacturing, retail/wholesale, and healthcare, among others. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.

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The Mainstreaming of Cloud-native Apps and Methodologies

August 11, 2023

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Paul Nashawaty

IT organizations are increasingly turning to a “cloud-first” strategy for their digital transformation initiatives to overcome challenges related to maintaining operations in a fast-paced business landscape. This approach involves prioritizing cloud-based, developer-friendly solutions over traditional on-premises software and infrastructure to increase agility.

Learn more about these trends with the infographic, Distributed Cloud Series: The Mainstreaming of Cloud-native Apps and Methodologies.

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Distributed Cloud Series: The Mainstreaming of Cloud-native Apps and Methodologies

July 21, 2023

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Paul Nashawaty
Research Objectives

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, organizations must be sufficiently agile and flexible to meet the evolving needs of their customers. However, many still rely on legacy applications that can struggle to handle the demands of modern-day business requirements. This can create significant challenges for IT departments that are tasked with maintaining business operations while transitioning to more modern approaches that drive their organizations forward. To overcome these challenges, organizations are increasingly turning to a “cloud-first” strategy for their digital transformation initiatives. This approach involves prioritizing cloud-based, developer-friendly solutions over traditional on-premises software and infrastructure, allowing organizations to leverage the scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness of cloud computing to improve their operations, increase agility, and meet the needs of their customers more effectively.

To assess the landscape for cloud-native applications and methodologies, Enterprise Strategy Group surveyed 378 IT and DevOps/AppDev professionals in North America (US and Canada) responsible for evaluating, purchasing, building, and managing application infrastructure in their organization. This study sought to answer the following:
- What percentage of production applications are currently based on a microservices cloud architecture today?
- Where are organizations deploying (or planning to deploy) cloud-native applications?
- What are the biggest challenges with cloud-native applications?
- How are microservices improving processes across the organization? What are the most impactful benefits?
- What are the biggest challenges or concerns with applications based on a microservices architecture?
- How many containers are supported within today’s environments? What is the preference for orchestration?
- What approaches are organizations employing to manage multi-cluster and multi-namespace deployments?
- What is driving the use of serverless functions?
- What types of tools and technologies are used to build and deliver cloud-native applications?
- What is the adoption status of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates?
- How do organizations distribute their development team’s time across tasks?
- How extensively are organizations using DevOps methodologies?
- What is the maturity level of organizations’ continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) initiatives?
- How extensively are organizations using GitOps approaches to automate application builds?
- How often do organizations typically deploy new code to production environments?
- What individuals or groups have the most influence on decisions around cloud-native applications?
- What are organizations’ perceptions around the effectiveness of their development teams?
- How confident are organizations in their development team’s ability to ship secure code at an efficient pace?
- How will spending on cloud-native technologies, services, and personnel change over the next 12-18 months?
- What actions will organizations take to optimize their cloud-native application development strategies?
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, technology, financial services, and retail/wholesale. For more details, please see the Research Methodology and Respondent Demographics sections of this report.

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Cloud Cost Analysis Is Universal and Impactful

July 20, 2023

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Scott Sinclair

The use of third-party cloud cost estimation and modeling tools has become a standard and essential practice for enterprise IT buyers. As the number and diversity of deployment options for applications and data have ballooned in recent years, decision makers find themselves overloaded with alternatives and needing help identifying the ideal deployment location and approach. Enterprise Strategy Group recently researched this trend to find out how prevalent the use of these tools is today as well as highlight the specific impacts they have on buying decisions.

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Distributed Cloud Series: Observability and Demystifying AIOps

July 19, 2023

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Jon Brown
Research Objectives
- Identify the value that organizations are receiving from observability and the challenges they face.
- Determine the current state of observability in the enterprise.
- Characterize firms that are intending to purchase observability tools.
- Monitor the adoption of observability and AIOps tools in enterprises and midmarket organizations.
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Business Drivers for Adopting Integrated Partner Solutions

July 7, 2023

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Doug Cahill

Increased IT complexity and the need to focus resources on strategic initiatives are pushing IT leaders to embrace product options that support technology convergence and platform consolidation. Integrated solutions from multiple vendors are a viable option to achieve those goals. Research from TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group found that boosting IT team productivity is the leading business driver for buying integrated solutions and that business expectations are being fully met or exceeded in a majority of cases.

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Challenges Across the Buyer’s Journey for Integrated Partner Solutions

July 7, 2023

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Doug Cahill

Various challenges complicate the process of researching, evaluating, purchasing, and deploying integrated solutions from strategic vendor partners. Research by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group found that current users encounter unique challenges in each stage—and for each stage, only about one-fifth of survey respondents said they didn’t experience any challenges. The often self-guided education that occurs during the research stage of the buyer’s journey is critical not only for solution selection, but also for project success and follow-on investments with the providers of the integrated solution. Buyers need to push solution vendors to address common challenges, while partnering vendors must take a unified approach in doing so.

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Cloud & IT Operations

July 6, 2023

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linchpin
Cloud & IT Operations

“Cloud-first” organizations have the most aggressive spending plans, but they also are looking for cost efficiencies through cloud cost management and FinOps.
The democratizing forces of cloud are changing the dynamics by which businesses compete.

ESG’s research shows that Cloud ranks 3rd among broad IT initiatives that have become significantly more important to organizations’ futures in the past two years.

Businesses are moving toward a hybrid blend of private and multi-public cloud consumption. The cloud purchase research we observe is focused on cloud migration, cloud security, monitoring and observability across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, and digital transformation. Enterprise Strategy Group’s Cloud & IT Operations analysts and demand-side research cover all facets of cloud and IT operations and observability, including:

AIOps

Cloud infrastructure management

ESG/Sustainability

FinOps

IT asset management

IT operations management

IT service management

Observability

Systems management
Research Brief

Industries Dive Headfirst Into AI-enhanced Observability

Observability vendors are in a race to leverage AI to automate root cause analysis, enable self-healing, optimize resources, reduce alert noise, automate log analysis, and deliver contextualized actionable insights to end users. Organizations across industries recognize that implementing AI-enhanced observability tools can give them strategic insights that optimize the economics of their application development and […]

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Analysts Covering Cloud & IT Operations

Jon Brown

Senior Analyst, Data Protection, Ops & Sustainability

Areas of Expertise

AIOps

Backup

Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery

Data Protection

DRaaS

FinOps

Read more
Recent Operations Insights

Research Brief | September 19, 2025

Red Hat InstructLab on IBM Cloud: Democratizing Enterprise AI Development Through Simplified Model Customization

Torsten Volk

Cloud & IT Operations

Research Brief | August 8, 2025

Pay-per-use Private Clouds Strategic for Data Centers

Scott Sinclair

Cloud & IT Operations

Research Brief | August 8, 2025

Public Cloud Providers Delivering Strategic Private Clouds

Scott Sinclair

Cloud & IT Operations

Research Brief | August 1, 2025

Private AI Modernizing Networks, Data Protection, and Storage

Scott Sinclair

Infrastructure
Infrastructure

July 6, 2023

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linchpin
Infrastructure

On premises as-a-service, simplifying hybrid cloud operations, and the rise of edge infrastructure are surging topics for buyer research as organizations balance cloud-native architectures for digital transformation with a focus on modernization investments on and off premises.
The cloud experience has been too beneficial to be isolated to off-premises public cloud services alone.

ESG’s latest research shows that building an enterprise hybrid cloud infrastructure is a top IT initiative for organizations

Enterprise Strategy Group’s Infrastructure analysts and demand-side research cover every aspect of an organization’s infrastructure strategy and technology framework, including:

Cloud-native storage

Composable

Computational storage

Data storage (block, file, object)

Hybrid cloud

Converged/Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)

Infrastructure as a Service

Intelligent/Automatic infrastructure

Kubernetes

Server/Compute
Research Brief

Container Orchestration Deployments Show Penchant for Wide Variety

Thanks to the well-known portability and efficiency benefits they offer, containers are a mainstay in many organizations’ IT strategies today. Recent research by TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group revealed that as teams turn their attention to container orchestration deployment and look to match the right approach with their specific operating requirements, they display a penchant for […]

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Analysts Covering Infrastructure

Simon Robinson

Principal Analyst, Storage & Converged Infrastructure

Areas of Expertise

Cloud-attached Storage

Cloud-native Storage

Flash-based Storage

Hybrid Cloud

Hyperconverged infrastructure

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

Read more

Scott Sinclair

Practice Director, Infrastructure, Cloud & DevOps

Areas of Expertise

Cloud-native Storage

Composable

Computational Storage

Data Storage

Hybrid Cloud

Hyperconverged (HCI)

Read more
Recent Infrastructure Insights

Infographic | September 12, 2025

The Critical Role of Storage in Building an Enterprise AI Infrastructure

Simon Robinson

Infrastructure

Survey Results | September 12, 2025

The Critical Role of Storage in Building an Enterprise AI Infrastructure

Simon Robinson

Infrastructure

Infographic | September 12, 2025

Networking and Security Convergence: Assessing SASE Progress and Best Practices

John Grady
Jim Frey

Cybersecurity

Research Report | September 12, 2025

Networking and Security Convergence: Assessing SASE Progress and Best Practices

John Grady
Jim Frey
Emily Marsh

Cybersecurity