Monitoring Survey 2015 - Demographics
In an earlier post I talked about the 2015 edition of the monitoring survey and the background to it. In this post, the first of several posts analyzing the results, I am going to look at the demographics of the responses.
The survey got 1,116 responses of which 884 were complete.
This post will cover the questions:
- Which of the following best describes your IT job role?
- How big is your organization?
- Are you responsible for IT monitoring in your organization
- If you are not responsible for monitoring, who is?
Everyone was required to answer questions 1 to 3. If they answered “No” to question 3 then they were prompted with question 4. If they answered that they didn’t do any monitoring they were presented with the end of the survey. Otherwise they moved onto the next question on the form.
Note - you can find last’s years answers to these questions in this blog post.
Job Roles
Operations, SysAdmins and SRE staff represented 40% of the respondents. This compares to 49% of last’s year respondents. The next largest group being DevOps at 28% of respondents which compares with 33% last year. A slightly higher percentage, 12%, of respondents reported themselves as developers. This compares to 9.2% last year. This year 15% of respondents classed themselves as management of some kind. An increase of 11% from last year.
As with last year’s results, the bias towards Operations roles is likely related to the communities where the survey was distributed. But it also may be related to Operations being the traditional owners of monitoring.
Organization Size
I also asked respondents about the size of their organization.
The results are reasonably well distributed across organizations of various sizes. The largest group, 31%, are small organizations of 1 to 50 employees. Closely behind this, at 21%, are slightly larger organizations of 50 to 250 employees. In the third place are organizations of larger than 1000 employees at 18%. This is very similar to last year’s demographic results.
Roles by Organization Size
I also created an overlay of roles distributed by organization size.
The graph reveals results similar to last year with the same slightly higher distribution of developers responding from smaller organizations and the more visible presence of architects and security folks in larger enterprises. We also see the influx of management respondents in the two largest categories of organization.
Monitoring Responsibility
I also asked respondents if they were responsible for monitoring or if the task belonged to someone else.
81% of respondents, were responsible for monitoring. A further 17% of respondents were not responsible for monitoring (slightly up from 15% last year). A small group, 1.6% of respondents, indicated that their organization did not do monitoring at all. This is slightly down from last year’s result of 2.5%.
In the case where respondents were not responsible for monitoring I asked them to indicate which groups were responsible. The respondents could specify all the groups that were involved in monitoring. I’ve rolled up the multiple responses into a summary graph.
These results again reflect the distribution of roles established by respondent’s who did manage monitoring. Strangely, last year’s category of Monitoring Team did not reappear this year.
I’ve also broken out those people who don’t monitor. Firstly, I’ve looked at the breakdown of roles across organization who do not monitor at all.
I’ve also broken out the count of people by organization size who don’t monitor.
Obviously it’s a very small sample size (18 respondents) but the largest group of people who don’t monitor are in smaller organizations.
In the next post I’ll be looking at the tools identified in the survey.
P.S. I am also writing a book about monitoring.
The posts: