Monitoring alone is no longer enough to navigate today’s complex, multifaceted IT ecosystems. To better understand the modern IT landscape, SolarWinds surveyed over 750 IT practitioners and leaders worldwide. The resulting SolarWinds 2026 State of Monitoring & Observability Report highlights the persistent gaps in IT environments and explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is bridging them.
Here is a sneak peek at three findings from the report.
1. Monitoring Strategies Are Misaligned with Infrastructure
While 51% of respondents still operate primarily or entirely on-premises, their monitoring strategies rarely match the environments they support. For example, 17% of surveyed organizations operate in hybrid environments, but only 10% actually utilize hybrid monitoring and observability strategies. Similarly, nearly a third of organizations are primarily or entirely cloud-based, yet fewer than one in ten use cloud-native monitoring. This widespread disconnect creates dangerous blind spots that can lead to persistent inconveniences or even widespread outages.
2. Tool Sprawl is Hindering Visibility
In an attempt to shore up these visibility gaps, organizations have reflexively adopted more tools. The average organization now juggles seven different monitoring and observability tools, with 16% of respondents using more than ten. Unfortunately, over half of respondents (55%) agree that their organizations are using too many monitoring and observability tools today. This sprawl ultimately fragments visibility, leading 77% of respondents to cite a lack of cross-environment visibility as an ongoing challenge. Furthermore, 75% point to a lack of coordination between different IT teams, which forces engineers to troubleshoot across siloed dashboards and increases mean time to resolution (MTTR).
3. AI is the Clear Path Forward
Where fragmented monitoring and observability setups fall short, AI is rising to the occasion. IT professionals are overwhelmingly optimistic about this shift, with many organizations already putting this technology to work: 47% are using AI to automate incident prioritization, and 45% use it to assist with root cause analysis and predict performance issues.
Dive Deeper. The full report explores much more, including sector-specific cloud adoption differences and the core organizational barriers slowing AI adoption.
Read the full results to see how your organization stacks up:
Read the full report here.
As you know, we love a good discussion on THWACK. So, once you read the full report, let us know what you found to be most surprising and what resonated the most with you in the comments below.
