Diverse man and woman looking upwards to bright sky, Dynatrace Business Observability report | DXC Technology

DXC | Dynatrace

From uptime to outcomes

The critical shift every leader must make now

New insights from DXC and Dynatrace on business observability, showing how enterprises can shift from traditional system performance monitoring to drive meaningful business outcomes.

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The gap that's costing businesses trillions

Global businesses are losing a staggering $3.1 trillion every year through inefficiencies, missed growth opportunities and exposure to unnecessary risk.

Every major business decision — whether elevating customer experience, entering a new market or accelerating digital transformation at scale — should be driven by data. Yet for most organizations, the data that should inform and guide these strategic decisions is fragmented, isolated and buried deep inside thousands of dashboards that don’t speak to one other.

Traditionally, IT teams have owned observability. However, their focus is on monitoring system health through technical metrics such as uptime, response time and CPU utilization. Meanwhile, business leaders prioritize metrics like revenue, conversion rates and customer churn. What IT measures rarely maps directly to the KPIs business leaders rely on to make decisions.

So, while technically organizations are monitoring everything, they’re often monitoring things in isolation. There is no unified view of the data so it can be reviewed in context, and leaders are left with an incomplete picture in a world where systems, experiences and outcomes are inherently connected.

The consequences are felt across the entire organization:

Customer experience suffers as businesses can’t see where journeys break down and can’t pinpoint the root cause.
Opportunities are missed and growth stalls as emerging trends and signals remain hidden in disconnected data.
Innovation slows when business leaders lack the confidence to test new ideas or scale cutting-edge AI initiatives effectively.
Revenue is lost as unresolved delays, inefficiencies and risks erode performance over time.

The key is to connect technical metrics to business outcomes, creating a shared, end‑to‑end view of performance across the enterprise. This requires a pivot from traditional IT observability to business observability.

Business observability allows organizations to evolve from knowing something is happening inside the system to predicting and understanding how it impacts the future and goals of the business.

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Why traditional monitoring and alerting fall short

When IT and business insights converge, observability becomes more than a diagnostic capability. It becomes a proactive growth enabler, powering sharper decisions, accelerating execution and turning operational clarity into sustained competitive advantage.

Business observability is about connecting technology signals to boardroom KPIs so leaders can predict and manage what matters. Without it, businesses are optimizing systems without context.

Traditional monitoring and alerting

Traditional monitoring and alerting analyzes system health — collecting and correlating data across infrastructure, networks, applications and security environments.

What does it mean for the business? While effective for identifying technical issues, these tools rarely provide the business context required to make strategic decisions. Insights tend to be point‑in‑time (current or past) and operational, with little visibility into trends or their impact on business KPIs. Without clear connections to business results, organizations are flying blind when prioritizing what impacts revenue, customer experience and growth.

Business observability

Business observability takes data beyond IT systems. It connects technology signals (technical telemetry) to business processes, KPIs, customer interactions and financial metrics, adding valuable context in real time.

What does it mean for the business? By grounding technology signals in business context, it allows leaders to understand and predict which issues matter most, why they matter and what action will make the biggest difference. It aligns IT investment in observability with strategic outcomes, enabling businesses to manage cost and risk while unlocking growth through optimized customer journeys and more relevant, personalized digital experiences.

Metrics

Do the pages in the customer journey load in under 3 seconds?
Are we getting 200 responses from our order API request?
Is there a spike in error logs?
Is the infrastructure appropriately sized?

Metrics

Are we seeing the expected order volume from our customers?
Does the claims processing error rate meet our SLO?
What is the average order fulfillment time?
Is our profit margin increasing over time?

The shift: From monitoring system performance to understanding business outcomes

Complexity has outpaced traditional decision making. Customer journeys span dozens of systems, technologies shift by the minute, and a single failure can ripple across revenue, compliance and reputation. Leaders can no longer afford to be exposed to the risk of making decisions on incomplete data or delayed insights.

Business observability changes this.