New Relic’s 2026 Observability Forecast finds that India leads globally in AI-agent monitoring and OpenTelemetry adoption, yet 61% of organisations experience high-impact outages weekly.
Indian enterprises are achieving some of the world’s strongest returns on observability investments, but growing system complexity and frequent outages are exposing a widening gap between technology adoption and operational resilience. According to New Relic’s 2026 Observability Forecast: India Edition, Indian organisations lose an average of $3 million for every high-impact outage, the highest reported cost globally.
Based on a survey of 2,575 IT and engineering leaders across 24 countries, including 500 respondents from India, the report highlights the mounting financial and productivity impact of downtime. An estimated 61% of Indian organisations experience high-impact outages weekly or more frequently, while 31% face such disruptions multiple times a day.
The financial exposure is compounded by an average downtime cost of $2.43 million per hour, equivalent to $40,500 per minute. Detection and recovery are also taking longer. The average time to detect a major outage has increased to 55 minutes from 41 minutes in 2025, while mean time to resolve severe incidents now exceeds an hour.
“India is leading the world in monitoring production AI agents, but tool sprawl is limiting the full value of observability investments.”
— Rob Newell, Senior Vice President and General Manager, APJ, New Relic
The findings reveal a striking contradiction in India’s technology landscape. The country leads globally in monitoring AI agents in production, with 56% of organisations doing so, against the global average of 35%. Adoption of AIOps and machine-learning model monitoring also exceeds global levels, at 54% and 57%, respectively.
Yet, developers are spending half their time addressing system disruptions, up from 35% last year and significantly above the global median of 30%.
India also leads in OpenTelemetry standardisation, with 42% of respondents reporting full standardisation, almost twice the global average of 22%. However, organisations use an average of six monitoring tools, creating fragmented data environments. Only 20% say AI-assisted observability has significantly improved event correlation, compared with 27% globally.
The report identifies security failures as another major source of operational risk: 32% of Indian organisations cite them as a frequent cause of downtime, nine percentage points above the global average.
Despite these challenges, observability investments are delivering measurable returns. The proportion of Indian enterprises achieving 3–5x ROI has risen from 19% to 35% year over year. Only 6% now report no financial return or do not track ROI, down from 12% in 2025.
“India’s digital economy is scaling at an extraordinary pace, but this high growth has outpaced operational discipline, leaving engineering teams to pay a heavy reactive troubleshooting tax,” said Rob Newell, Senior Vice President and General Manager for APJ at New Relic.
Newell said businesses must move from disconnected point solutions towards unified observability platforms to improve developer productivity, overcome tool fragmentation and unlock greater value from AI-driven operations.
The findings suggest that India’s next observability challenge is no longer simply expanding monitoring capabilities. It is connecting increasingly complex technology environments, reducing operational blind spots and converting advanced telemetry into faster detection, recovery and business outcomes.