New Relic’s 2026 Observability Forecast for Asia‑Pacific reveals that organisations in Australia and New Zealand operate the region’s most stable IT environments, yet they detect high‑impact outages faster than peers while taking considerably longer to resolve them, a gap the report links to growing AI‑generated code complexity.
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.