The survey, conducted with Enterprise Technology Research and covering 2,575 IT and engineering leaders across 24 countries, found that 18% of Australian and New Zealand respondents keep downtime costs below US $1 million per hour – the highest proportion in the Asia‑Pacific region.
Engineering teams in the two‑nation market spend a median 23% of their time addressing disruptions, compared with 30% globally and a striking 50% in India, reflecting a lighter disruption burden that translates into fewer outages.
Indeed, 39% of organisations in Australia and New Zealand experience a high‑impact outage once a month or less, while 31% of Indian firms report multiple outages each day.
Despite this relative stability, the report highlights a pronounced resolution lag: 36% of respondents detect high‑impact outages within 30 minutes (mean detection time 29 minutes, better than the global 35‑minute average), yet only 17% manage to resolve those incidents in the same half‑hour window – the widest gap in the region.
Fragmented monitoring data appears to be a key factor. Only 41% of Australian and New Zealand organisations say they have unified telemetry on a single platform, below the global 55% benchmark, and adoption of distributed tracing (32%) and Kubernetes monitoring (24%) also trails regional averages.
Demand for a consolidated observability platform is rising, with interest climbing to 37% from 24% a year earlier, as firms seek to replace disconnected toolsets – the median number of observability tools used in ANZ is four, versus six across the broader Asia‑Pacific.
The surge in AI‑driven software development is cited as a driver of this demand: 42% of ANZ respondents identify AI applications as a primary catalyst for observability investment, up from 32% in the prior year, and 47% use GitHub Copilot while 37% employ OpenAI Codex. Half of those surveyed say the growth of AI‑generated code makes robust observability essential.
Cost considerations are sharpening: 41% now list price as the most important purchasing criterion, a jump from 18% in 2024, while 28% point to budget shortfalls and 32% to complex technology stacks as barriers to full‑stack visibility. Consequently, 49% say they are prioritising staff training on existing tools rather than buying new ones.
Rob Newell, senior vice‑president and general manager for APJ at New Relic, said the findings show a market that has maintained disciplined, lean operations but now faces a “cautious approach to technology investment” that hampers deep visibility. He urged leaders to shift from a defensive cost‑containment stance to a proactive strategy of platform consolidation to cope with AI‑generated code and emerging agentic AI.