EngineeringIndustry 4.0Manufacturing

New Relic report highlights AI and IoT driving manufacturing

New Relic, the intelligent observability platform, has released its “State of Observability for Industrials, Materials, and Manufacturing” report, offering a detailed analysis of observability adoption and its impact on business value.

Based on insights from 285 technology professionals and aligned with the 2023 Observability Forecast, the report reveals that manufacturers are increasingly investing in observability to optimise uptime, enhance productivity, improve cross-team collaboration, and inform strategic decision-making.

The findings underscore the significant return on investment (ROI) associated with full-stack observability, with respondents reporting marked improvements after implementation. Importantly, 65% of respondents from the industrials, materials, and manufacturing sectors reported a reduction in their mean time to resolution (MTTR) since adopting observability. The primary drivers of observability adoption include security (50%), AI technologies (44%), and IoT technologies (43%).

“We are witnessing a significant shift in how manufacturers adapt and thrive in a world driven by technology. These industries rely on observability to push innovation forward while maintaining reliable systems for their customers—all while cutting downtime and costs,“ said Manav Khurana, Chief Product Officer, New Relic.

Observability and AI

As the manufacturing sector advances into the Fifth Industrial Revolution, there is a strong emphasis on adopting new technologies to gain a competitive edge. Nearly 44% of manufacturing organisations identified AI technologies as a key driver of their observability needs. The integration of observability with AI provides deeper insights into telemetry data, crucial for managing the increasing complexity of expanding data sets.

Observability is essential for the success of AI, as it aids teams in understanding telemetry data, improving MTTR, and allowing developers to address code-level errors directly within their integrated development environments (IDE). Moreover, it enhances automation, leading to faster incident detection, alerting, and resolution.

Manufacturing organisations that have implemented full-stack observability have reported significant improvements in MTTR, with 34% noting a reduction of 25% or more since adopting observability practices. These organisations have also experienced fewer high-impact outages, with only 30% reporting outages at least once a week, compared to the overall average of 32%. Furthermore, just 12% of respondents estimated that outages cost their organisations more than $1 million per hour, compared to 21% across all sectors.

Boosting productivity

More than half (51%) of manufacturing organisations indicated that observability has enhanced cross-team collaboration and strategic decision-making. Additionally, nearly half (47%) of practitioners reported that observability has increased productivity by enabling them to identify and resolve issues more swiftly.

“New Relic is a critical component in our DevSecOps cycle. New Relic will allow us to normalize the process of driving continuous application and service improvement through observing the user experience, which is key for any project and moves beyond setting and forgetting after deployment,” said Mitsuhiro Mabuchi, Ph.D, Group Manager, Cloud CoE Grp., DS System Development Dept., Advanced Data Science Management Div., Advanced R&D and Engineering Co., (Concurrently Lead of the CCoE Virtual Team at the Direct Reporting Digital Transformation Promotion Dept.), Toyota Motor Corporation.

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