ANZ tops APAC for stable IT ops, but outages still bite: New Relic

Australia and New Zealand may have the calmest IT operations in Asia-Pacific, but the fire drills are not over.

New Relic, in a guest research post published by iTWire on 23 September 2026, said its 2026 Observability Forecast: Asia-Pacific report found ANZ enterprises had the lowest engineering firefighting burden in the region.

That is the flattering bit.

The less comfortable finding is that local teams are still struggling to close the gap between spotting outages and fixing them. According to the New Relic material, ANZ organisations report strong operational stability and lean software stacks, yet remain slow to resolve critical outages.

That matters because the software environment is getting messier, fast.

New Relic linked the issue to the rise of AI-generated code, which it said is introducing new complexity into IT environments. The company said demand for AI application monitoring grew by 10 percentage points in a year, as enterprises grapple with code complexity.

The report is framed as an Asia-Pacific view of observability in the AI era. MySecurity Marketplace also lists the report under the title “2026 Observability Forecast: Asia-Pacific report”, but the detailed claims supplied here come from the iTWire guest research post attributed to New Relic.

Observability is the plumbing behind modern digital operations. It helps teams see what is happening across applications, infrastructure and services, so they can detect faults, trace causes and respond before users feel the pain.

In plain English: it is how technology teams stop guessing when something breaks.

New Relic’s findings suggest ANZ teams are doing well on one side of that equation. Fewer firefights means fewer engineers being dragged into constant emergency mode. Leaner software stacks can also mean fewer moving parts to monitor.

But detection is not the finish line. If a critical outage is found quickly but fixed slowly, customers still cop the disruption and engineers still lose time.

The AI angle sharpens the problem. More AI-generated code can mean faster development, but it can also create harder-to-understand systems if teams do not have the right visibility and controls around them. New Relic’s supplied research positions AI application monitoring as a growing priority for that reason.

The big takeaway is simple. ANZ may be ahead of the region on stability, according to New Relic, but the next contest is speed of resolution.

In the AI coding era, quiet systems are not enough. Teams need to know what broke, why it broke and how to fix it, quickly.