Teams are locked into a cycle of suffering characterized by the feeling that they are sprinting just to stay still. This morale and productivity-destroying state is caused by an inability to find time to save time. Our new research, The State of Availability Report 2022, discovered that teams know what they want to do—harness cloud and DevOps practices and tools to advance digital transformation—but something’s getting in the way.

Today’s customers see availability as a given. What do they really want? Bigger, better technology with new features and faster platforms. But, according to our recently released Moogsoft State of Availability Report, teams burn their time, money and energy on incident management. In fact, engineers overwhelmingly report that incident management takes up most of their time.

Moogsoft pioneered AIOps, essentially inventing the market 10 years ago. It is worthwhile revisiting why we did that to understand where we are going. My background is as the founder and inventor of Micromuse Netcool, and the RiverSoft’s OpenRiver technology.

Most engineering teams are no strangers to key performance indicators (KPIs), those metrics tracking progress toward critical goals and targets. Ideally, tech leaders design KPIs to focus teams on what matters and prove their contribution to the company’s overall performance. Of course, KPI data should also uncover critical information that guides informed decision-making. For engineering teams tasked with managing the customer experience, KPIs often track availability.

Engineering teams use a lot of single-domain monitoring tools. In fact, the average team manages and maintains 16 monitoring tools — and up to 40 — according to Moogsoft’s State of Availability Report. While IT leaders select and implement these tools to save teams time, our research finds they do quite the opposite. Engineers spend far and away more time on monitoring than they do on any other task — innovative, value-creating tasks included.