Open source solutions are continuing to dominate the observability space, with 75% of respondents to Grafana Labs’ latest Observability Survey saying they use an open source solution in their observability efforts.

Thirty percent of respondents say they only use open source, and 36% use mostly open source. On the other end of the spectrum, 8% use only commercial solutions, 16% use mostly commercial solutions, and 10% use a roughly equal mix of open source and commercial solutions. 

Seventy percent of respondents were using Prometheus and OpenTelemetry at some level, and half of respondents reported that their investments in those two technologies increased in the last year. 

The company also found shifting popularity in the usage of different observability pillars. Traces are growing in popularity, along with profiles, which is another newer telemetry pillar. Fifty-seven percent of respondents used traces and 16% used profiles, while the more traditional pillars, metrics and logs, were used by 95% and 87%, respectively.

Companies are also leveraging many different observability tools in their stack. Grafana Labs found that there were 101 different observability tools in use across respondents, with the average number of tools a company uses being eight, which is a decrease from last year’s average of nine. However, 64% use five or fewer tools, and only 2% use more than 50 tools. 

Larger companies tend to have more data sources, with companies with more than 5,000 employees averaging 24 data sources and companies with 10 or fewer employees averaging six sources.

The biggest observability challenge for organizations was complexity, and alert fatigue is the biggest obstacle to faster incident response. 

And finally, Grafana Labs found that while cost of observability solutions is the most important factor when choosing observability tools, it is not necessarily critical. Less than a third of respondents were concerned about observability costs, and the majority are just wanting to ensure they’re getting value from the tools they’ve invested in.

Other factors when selecting a tool include ease of use, interoperability with other tools, whether it is open source, ease of switching to another tool in the future, familiarity within the organization, and AI/ML capabilities.   

“Our 2025 Observability Survey confirms that organizations are embracing a diverse, open source-centric approach to observability,” said Tom Wilkie, CTO of Grafana Labs. “With teams managing more tools and data sources than ever before, the findings show that complexity remains the top challenge. We’re working to directly address these pain points by enhancing interoperability between technologies like OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, reducing the cognitive load through AI-powered features, and providing out-of-the-box integrated solutions like Kubernetes Monitoring.”

Grafana Labs’ survey was based on responses from 1255 observability practitioners collected between September 18, 2024 and January 2, 2025.