The Sobering Cost of Downtime
The numbers are stark. A new global survey from New Relic pegs the median cost of a high-impact IT outage at $2 million per hour (roughly $33,333 a minute), with a median annual hit of $76 million. This operational risk lands just as enterprises are layering in agentic and LLM-powered services, adding speed and complexity to already distributed stacks.
The Full-Stack Advantage
One lever stands out: full-stack observability. Defined as visibility spanning infrastructure, applications, security, digital experience (DEM), and logs, it offers tangible benefits:
- Cost Reduction: For respondents with end-to-end deployment, the median cost of outages falls by half, to $1 million per hour.
- Fewer Outages: Only 23% of full-stack shops report weekly high-impact outages, compared to 40% among those without full coverage.
- Faster Detection: Mean time to detection (MTTD) drops to 28 minutes—seven minutes faster than peers lacking comprehensive visibility.
AI Monitoring AI
AI adoption is reshaping the landscape. As LLM-powered apps proliferate, usage of AI monitoring has climbed from 42% in 2024 to 54% in 2025. Respondents ranked AI-assisted troubleshooting and automatic root-cause analysis as the most valuable capabilities for incident response.
The strategy is also shifting towards tool consolidation. The average number of observability tools per organization has fallen by 27% since 2023, as teams seek to unify telemetry and standardize workflows to correlate signals quickly.
Source: Report: Full-Stack Observability Cuts Downtime Costs - DevOps.com