Companies are moving from traditional software delivery practices to new microservice delivery techniques, said Scalyr in their State of DevOps Observability Report on Thursday. But that model may be causing serious problems for a majority of engineers.

While the increase in production is great, 73% of engineers who push code every day are spending over half their time troubleshooting, said the report. If companies want to adopt microservice production, they need to make sure their observability tools can stay up to speed.

Scalyr, which offers a log management platform for engineers, surveyed 155 software development practitioners on their application delivery practices for the report.

Instead of the traditional, monolithic delivery style, three-quarters of respondents deliver at least some of their applications as microservices and one-third deliver most as such, said the report. As explained by TechRepublic’s Dan Patterson, microservices are “the small, single-task focused sub-processes communicate inside larger application packages.” This practice is supposed to make updating and managing applications easier and faster.

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Organizations are also delivering more software faster than ever before, with 71% of engineers pushing code weekly and one-third pushing code into production at least once a day, said the report.

The increase in operation demands more DevOps observability. While companies do have many visibility tools, this high volume of microservice production is resulting in a high volume of problems, according to the report.

“Engineering teams have really upped their game, delivering software more quickly and efficiently than ever before,” Scalyr CEO Steve Newman said in a press release. “However, their modern approach puts increased pressure on monitoring and troubleshooting. Companies that are undergoing a transition to microservices and a rapid or continuous software delivery pipeline need to make sure their observability tools and processes can keep up.”

The big takeaways for tech leaders:

  • One-third of development practitioners are delivering their applications as microservices and pushing code daily. — Scalyr, 2018
  • Of those surveyed, 73% of engineers who push code daily spend over half their time troubleshooting microservice problems. — Scalyr, 2018