Posted by Mumbai: While, the median annual downtime from high-impact IT outages is 77 hours, with a cost of $1.9 million per hour, in India, the median hourly cost for high business impact was $2 million per hour, according to a New Relic study.
The findings demonstrate a strong correlation between full-stack observability and reduced downtime, fewer interruptions, and lower annual outage costs—reinforcing the critical role observability plays in maximising operational efficiencies and business performance.
New Relic, the Intelligent Observability Platform, released its 2024 Observability Forecast, surveying over 1,700 technology professionals across 16 countries, the report highlights key growth areas, challenges, and external trends influencing observability investments.
Outages drive considerable downtime and revenue loss
According to the research, engineering teams devote 30% of their time addressing interruptions—equivalent to 12 hours out of a standard 40-hour work week. The leading causes of unplanned outages over the last two years include network failure (35%), third-party or cloud provider services failure (29%), and human error (28%).
Nearly two-thirds (65%) of respondents in India experienced high-business-impact outages at least once per week, with 31% stating they experienced them once a day or more, the highest of all countries surveyed.
Four-fifths (84%) said the cost of that considerable downtime for critical business app outages was $500,000 or more per hour, including three-quarters (77%) who said it cost more than $1 million per hour.
The median hourly cost for high-business-impact IT outages in India was $2 million, slightly higher than the median $1.9 million per hour outage cost across all respondents.
The report also highlights that observability practices can significantly reduce downtime. Key practices that have helped reduce downtime include root cause analysis (RCA) and post-incident reviews (37%), monitoring DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics (34%), tracking the golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) (33%), and managing Mean Time to Detect and Resolve (MTTx) outages (33%).
Organisations in India specifically, indicated that observability practices have helped their organisation reduce downtime with over two-thirds (67%) saying their MTTR (Mean Time to Repair) improved since adopting observability. Nearly half (44%) of those respondents said they tracked, reported, and incentivised MTTx metrics to reduce their downtime.
“The high outage costs associated with downtime can be crippling for organisations. With Indian businesses experiencing outages more frequently than any other country surveyed, the need for full-stack observability has never been greater,” said Peter Marelas, Field CTO for APJ, New Relic.
“The Observability Forecast has once again highlighted the tangible business benefits that observability delivers including less downtime, fewer critical outages, and high ROI, and cemented its role in helping organisations achieve their core business goals,” added Marelas.