How Observability Tools Empower Developers to Succeed

Note: A version of this article was originally published on CIO Influence. 

Burnout is widespread in the world of software engineering. According to a 2023 report, 73% of developers have experienced burnout at least once in their careers, and work-life balance has been cited as a key driver of developer satisfaction. 

Luckily, there are tools and strategies that teams can implement to reduce mental load, prevent burnout, and improve overall developer wellbeing. Let’s explore some current challenges and potential solutions. 

Common Challenges

Software is at a breaking point. Budgets are tight, and pressure from higher-ups can be unceasing, expecting you to do more with less. Many have cited the well-documented developer shortfall as a cause of stress. Difficulties in hiring and employee retention have persisted following the Covid era, leading to increased workloads spread across smaller teams. 

And then there’s the NOISE.  

On average, developers spend more than 17 hours per week debugging and resolving technical debt, diverting their attention from innovative work that could bring value to their projects. Constant firefighting slows down productivity, increases frustration, and leads to burnout over time. 

Compounding this issue is the cognitive load created by complex codebases and insufficient automation. As systems grow more intricate, it becomes more difficult to keep track of dependencies and understand the impact of changes, often leading to disruptions. Unclear requirements and frequent manual interventions add to devs’ workloads, further reducing efficiency. 

How Observability Tools like Insight Hub Can Help

Having end-to-end visibility into your application is key to maintaining your sanity as a developer. Observability tools give you a holistic view of your software system, so you can see what’s happening at every level.  

SmartBear Insight Hub is an end-to-end observability solution that focuses on developer experience. No more digging through logs, no more guessing what caused a crash or slowdown – you can see everything you need at a glance. 

Here are a few ways solutions like Insight Hub can help make your life easier: 

• Catching problems early: Insight Hub alerts you when something is wrong before it becomes a major problem, whether it’s an error or performance issue, it enables you to take steps to fix it. This can prevent downtime and outages, which saves a lot of headaches. 

• Finding the root cause easily: When you have a clear understanding of what’s happening in your system, you can narrow down the possible root causes of an issue more easily. Insight Hub for Distributed Tracing makes it easy to narrow in on issues in your code and fix them quickly. 

• Reducing tech debt: By saving hours debugging and fixing bad code, observability tools allow you to carve out some time to work on innovative projects like mobile-first initiatives, adopting a microservices architecture or building new features. 

• Enabling effective communication: When you can share data and insights from your observability tools, it can help everyone to understand the problem and work together to fix it. With efficient Insight Hub features like automatic error assignment and code ownership customization, devs can experience a more relaxed work environment. 

• Ensuring a great user experience: Engineers aren’t the only ones who benefit from the use of observability tools. When developers can quickly identify, fix, and prevent problems, end-users are less likely to experience errors, crashes, or performance issues. This can lead to a better user experience, which can boost customer satisfaction and business outcomes. 

But no tool is perfect – sometimes there can be too much noise and not enough direction to decide how to proceed. Oftentimes, a lot of up front work is needed to ensure that your observability stack is working to reduce your stress, not add to it.  

To avoid this double-edged sword, teams should focus on developer-friendly observability tools that are low-friction and easy to integrate into their current workflows. Insight Hub is built for developers, by developers. Focused on quickly surfacing the most important information and data, Insight Hub makes it easy to understand the holistic health of your app and drill down into the details when you need to. 

Help your developers get more done

Observability solutions like Insight Hub are not a silver bullet for every software challenge, but they can still play a valuable role in reducing stress for developers. By giving you a clear view of your entire system, they can help you quickly identify and resolve issues, reduce tech debt, and enable better team communication. 

Take control of your observability ecosystem with Insight Hub – try it now with a 14-day free trial.