A Cisco survey report reveals that nearly 57 per cent of software developers spend significant time being dragged into ‘war rooms’ to solve application performance issues rather than investing their time developing new software applications as part of their organisation’s innovation strategy.
The survey found that while developers are expected to deliver new tools and functionality at ever-faster speeds, they also find themselves receiving endless demands to help Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and IT operations teams manage applications’ ongoing availability and performance.
Developers report that their organisations lack the tools and visibility to understand the root cause of application issues.
The result is teams of developers spending hours in war room meetings and debugging applications instead of creating code and building new applications.
“While most IT departments have deployed a multitude of monitoring tools across different domains, they simply fall short when it comes to today’s complex and dynamic IT environments, leaving technologists unable to generate a full and unified view into their applications and the supporting IT stack,” said Shannon McFarland, Vice President, Cisco DevNet.
Developers believe this stems from IT departments lacking a full and unified view of applications and the supporting IT stack. Developers are acutely concerned about the potential consequences this could have, with three-quarters (75 per cent) of those surveyed fearing that the lack of visibility and insight into IT performance is increasing the chances of their organisation suffering downtime and disruption to business-critical applications.
Globally, nearly 85 per cent of those surveyed report encountering increased pressure to accelerate release velocity, while close to 77 per cent point to mounting pressure to deliver seamless and secure digital experiences.
Alongside full-stack observability, many developers (39%) also feel that their organization (and themselves) would benefit from deploying AI to automate application issue detection and resolution. Rather than relying on manual processes, AI can enable IT teams to cut through overwhelming volumes of application data to identify the most serious issues and apply fixes in real-time.
In addition, developers are ready to embrace new ways of working within the IT department to drive greater efficiency and productivity, as well as a more streamlined approach to managing application performance.
The majority (57 per cent) believe there needs to be greater ongoing collaboration between developers and IT teams. This is already being seen in shift left testing and widespread adoption of DevOps and DevSecOps methodologies, so that application availability, performance and security considerations are embedded into the development lifecycle from the outset.
The situation significantly affects morale among developers, with 82 per cent admitting that they feel frustrated and demotivated and 54 per cent increasingly inclined to leave their current jobs.
“When things go wrong, it’s incredibly difficult to quickly identify where the root cause lies, often resulting in panic war room situations and developers having to spend hours trying to help their colleagues in IT operations identify the quickest path to remediation,” said McFarland.
Developers are encouragingly aware that solutions are available to address these concerns. As many as 91 per cent feel they should be playing a bigger role in shaping and deciding on the solutions needed within their organisation.
Above all else, developers point to full-stack observability as a potential game changer, providing SREs and IT operations teams with unified visibility into applications and supporting infrastructure across cloud-native and on-premises environments.
While developers themselves may not be the primary users of full-stack observability solutions – focusing instead on their specific domain expertise – 78 per cent believe that implementing full-stack observability within their organization would be beneficial.
Developers recognise the benefits of having unified visibility across the IT estate and acknowledge that full-stack observability would make it much easier and quicker for operations teams to identify issues, understand root causes, and carry out necessary remediation.
In turn, this would result in fewer technologists from multiple domain teams being required to attend war room sessions, freeing up talent—including developers—to focus on their day jobs.
Nearly 76 per cent of developers went so far as to state that it’s becoming impossible to do their job because SREs and IT operations teams don’t have the insights they need to manage IT performance effectively.
“At a time when developer talent is in such high demand, organizations must do everything they can to empower their teams with the tools they need to perform to their full potential and maximize impact,” added McFarland. Full-stack observability has become mission-critical—without it, IT teams simply cannot deliver the levels of digital experience that consumers now demand.”
