Today, the retail industry faces new macroeconomic challenges, with the rapid increase in energy costs, high inflation, and supply chain disruptions. As the threat of shrinking margins looms, retailers are focusing on cost reduction and strategic investments to ensure the best possible business value without sacrificing the customer experience.

While omnichannel is essential, retailers don’t have an easy way to gain visibility into their data across different sources, making it harder to observe the customer, product, or order journey across all touchpoints. They often depend on third-party tools and services that they have little or no access to—including onsite or in-store (such as POS systems, kiosks, and video cameras), online (such as web and mobile apps like payment processing services), and on-route (such as external distribution logistics and fulfillment service APIs)—which inhibits them from easily implementing telemetry in their retail strategy. These blind spots make it difficult for organizations to make data-based decisions that could impact the bottom line.

For retailers to keep digital storefronts open and customers engaged, they are investing in observability tools that give them complete visibility into their software across complicated technology stacks. Observability tools proactively collect and visualize data, then apply intelligence so organizations not only understand the behavior of their IT ecosystems but can also detect issues immediately and quickly solve them.

This report focuses on the adoption and business value of observability across the retail/consumer-focused sector. It is based on insights derived from 173 respondents surveyed in association with the 2023 Observability Forecast.