Skip to main content

The Forrester Wave™: XDR Platforms, Q2 2026

Access report
About usPartnersSupport|Log in
Elastic logo
Start free trialContact sales

From reactive to resilient: Findings from the Total Economic Impact of Elastic Observability 2026

How consolidating onto one full-stack observability platform unlocked full visibility and millions in savings

By
Nicole Volk

When Forrester Consulting interviewed five enterprises about their observability practices before they started using Elastic Observability, the story was consistent: siloed telemetry, reactive incident management, and infrastructure costs that kept climbing while visibility stayed incomplete.

We lost a couple of customers because of outages we had, and how long it took to resolve them,and the fact that they happened again…It’s definitely been been better as we have matured our monitoring and telemetry and reduced our MTTR across all of our services [with Elastic].

Sr. Director of Application Operations at a fintech company

To quantify that improvement, Elastic commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study. Forrester interviewed decision-makers across fintech, financial services, telecommunications, media, and consumer manufacturing and then modeled their experiences into a composite $10 billion-revenue enterprise serving 25 million customers. The findings confirm that moving to a resilient operational model with Elastic Observability drove significant gains in both operational efficiency and financial performance.

Before Elastic: A fragmented, reactive landscape

As the customer’s application footprints expanded, through organic growth, acquisitions, and the arrival of AI workloads, observability coverage was unable to scale. Each new environment meant another tool, another license, another silo of telemetry. By the time organizations realized the model wasn't working, they were managing six or more overlapping platforms, paying for data storage they couldn't fully use, and making an impossible tradeoff: cap log and metric ingestion to control cost or leave critical systems unmonitored. 

The reason we put Elastic in place was because there was a gap in our tools and environments. Identifying logs, [and] finding the right logs to troubleshoot a problem took a very long time, which extended mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Sr. Director of application operations, fintech

These organizations were looking for a platform that could:

  • Unify logs, metrics, events, and traces in one place

  • Scale observability coverage without storage costs spiraling out of control

  • Give non-technical teams access to dashboards they could actually use

  • Deliver on a roadmap that included AI and agentic capabilities today, not as a future promise

  • Fundamentally reduce MTTR by shifting from reactive firefighting to proactive incident detection

Elastic Observability addressed each of these needs.

Key TEI study results

For the composite organization, the shift was profound. Rather than reacting to outages after customer impact, teams used Elastic's ML-driven anomaly detection, root-cause analysis, application performance monitoring (APM), and AI assistant to move proactively, catching signals before they became incidents and closing the loop faster when incidents did occur. 

Below are some of the key benefits observed:

  • Up to 75% reduction in system downtime by year three, protecting $15.2 million in revenue-at-risk over three years

  • 95% reduction in SRE time spent on monitoring and incident resolution, freeing $3.5 million in engineering capacity

  • 55% reduction in developer time on testing, deployment, and debugging by year three — 263,983 hours saved worth $6.6 million over three years

  • 70% reduction in observability infrastructure costs through data tiering, compression, and tool consolidation from six to two

  • 0.6% improved customer retention by year three

A lot of vendors force you to do indexing, which is expensive. Elastic gives you all the templates to analyze your logs so you can better decide if you want to index or not ... It reduces proprietary log saving. It helps reduce spend on other expensive log storage providers.

Director of Software Engineering, Telecommunications

Building a business case for Elastic Observability

Organizations that started using Elastic Observability didn't just solve an observability problem, they unlocked compounding returns across engineering productivity, infrastructure costs, and business resilience. 

To see the full methodology, composite data, and customer stories behind every number, read the complete Forrester TEI study and build your own business case.

Get the TEI study on Elastic Observability.

The release and timing of any features or functionality described in this post remain at Elastic's sole discretion. Any features or functionality not currently available may not be delivered on time or at all.

Sign up for Elastic Cloud free trial

Spin up a fully loaded deployment on the cloud provider you choose. As the company behind Elasticsearch, we bring our features and support to your Elastic clusters in the cloud.

Start free trial