In 2025, 75% of UK IT teams reported experiencing service outages due to missed alerts, according to Splunk's State of Observability 2025 report. The study surveyed 1,855 ITOps and engineering professionals, including 300 respondents from the UK.
The findings identify alert fatigue as a notable challenge to operational resilience. In the UK, 54% of respondents indicated that false alerts affect team morale, while 15% said they sometimes ignore or suppress alerts—higher than the global average of 13%.
Contributing factors include tool sprawl (61%), false alerts (54%), and overall alert volume (34%), reflecting the complexity of managing large-scale IT operations.
Unclear incident response ownership also compounds the issue. Only 21% of UK respondents regularly assign incidents to specific teams, whereas 36% rarely do so. Limited clarity around responsibilities can increase the risk of important alerts being overlooked.
Strengthening cross-team collaboration and enhancing observability practices can help improve operational resilience. Defined ownership and coordination across teams support timely identification and resolution of critical alerts.
IT teams report that without clear context or ownership, it can be difficult to determine which alerts require immediate attention, affecting response efficiency. Missed critical alerts can result in downtime and customer impact, with potential financial and reputational consequences.
Observability tools that triage alerts, provide context, and suggest remediation steps are important, as is limiting the number of platforms or interfaces that staff must manage.
The report also notes that closer collaboration between observability and security teams reduces missed alerts. Globally, 64% of respondents stated that stronger inter-departmental collaboration lowers the likelihood of customer-impacting incidents. Combining coordinated teamwork with established observability practices can increase operational resilience, supporting both IT systems and the teams that maintain them.
