New Relic, the Intelligent Observability company, released its State of Observability for Telecommunications and Technology report, which reveals the dramatically different approaches to observability adoption being taken by these two industries.

Surveying over 500 engineering leaders and IT team members at telecommunications and technology companies, the report is based on data from the New Relic 2025 Observability Forecast. The report reveals a link between companies using AI and realizing a strong return on investment (ROI) by adopting observability to monitor AI systems.

The data also suggests that telcos are betting big on AI-powered observability, while technology companies lead the way in traditional monitoring capabilities.

Outages are frequent and costly
The research reveals that 57percent of telcos and 27percent of technology respondents experience high-business-impact outages weekly or more. The cost of this downtime is staggering and a shared concern for both industries. High-impact outages cost telcos an average of $2 million per hour, compared to $1.6 million per hour for technology companies. For technology companies, outages can be linked to revenue loss and operational problems, but for telcos, the stakes are higher. An outage can represent a public safety crisis with implications for regulatory action.

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Two paths to observability; one strong focus on AI adoption
Telcos are taking an AI-focused approach to observability adoption, with 74percent already adopting AI monitoring; a figure that significantly outpaces the global average of 54percent across all industries.

Less than 52percent of technology companies are currently deploying AI monitoring, but 94percent plan to do so in the next three years. Technology organizations have also taken a methodical, bottom-up approach towards observability, with 71percent currently deploying alerts and network monitoring and 69percent using Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) practices.

They also have high deployment rates of foundational capabilities like infrastructure monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and distributed tracing. Despite strategic industry differences, the push toward advanced automation is unifying. AI technologies are the top strategic driver for observability adoption in both industries, cited by 32percent of telcos and 38percent of technology companies.

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Observability creates a strong return on investment
Both telcos and tech organizations see strong returns from their observability investments, with 58percent of telcos and 49percent of tech companies reporting a ROI of 2-3x or more. Additionally, 10percent of telco respondents report between 5-10x returns, while 50percent of respondents state that it helps them achieve business KPIs - well above the overall average of all respondents at 36percent.

"This data is powerful because it shows more than one path to observability maturity. For telcos, they face extreme pressure from high outage costs and are successfully leapfrogging traditional monitoring to go AI-first, while IT organizations are leveraging their strengths by building a developer-centric foundation," said New Relic Chief Technology Strategist Nic Benders.

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“For both industries, observability is no longer just a technical tool; it is a key strategy driving business performance as well as operational stability across both the telecommunications and technology industries," adds Nic Benders.

Other key findings from the report include:

• Uptime and reliability are key observability benefits: Operational efficiency (43percent) is the most cited benefit by technology organizations, followed by improved uptime and reliability at 40percent. For telcos, benefits highlighted include improved system uptime at 38percent, followed by improved developer productivity at 32percent.
• Training staff and tool consolidation key priorities: The data shows that to get the most out of their observability spend, close to half (49percent) of technology respondents and 42percent of telcos planned to train their staff to use these platforms. Additionally, 47percent of technology respondents and 37percent of telcos said that they planned to consolidate observability tools in the future.