Industry Report: The State of Retail IT Observability in 2025
Our new retail IT research reveals that poor network observability costs retailers $9.95 million annually — yet most don’t realize the scale of their losses. Read our comprehensive 2025 report to discover how retailers are transforming IT from cost centre to profit driver via observability.
Brought to you by the observability experts
For more than 25 years, Highlight has been helping organisations realise their ideal network management regimes with the always-up-to-date Highlight Service Observability Platform.
More than 4,000 organisations deploy Highlight across 100,000+ locations worldwide
Network visibility with Insight UI
Gain complete visibility into your retail IT infrastructure with comprehensive network monitoring that transforms reactive support into proactive business enablement.
- Network visibility at global, regional, branch or even single connection level
- Immediate issue identification with Heat Tiles and Grid View
- Information turned into action
- Modern accessibility experience and UI customisation
Native multi-tenant monitoring
Monitor all connections and applications across multiple locations, regions, and service categories with a single unified instance that scales with your retail operations.
- Secure tenant segregation
- Unlimited tenant levels for teams, regions or customers
- Frictionless scaling with unlimited users for free
- Comprehensive and secure administration
Free report
The State of Retail IT Observability in 2025
IT infrastructure challenges cost retail businesses $9.95M annually. New research reveals 26% of retail IT decision track financial impact of IT issues.
Our series of surveys and roundtable events, alongside an analysis of industry statistics, has revealed a large gap in the observability need and capability for the average retail business:
- $9.95 million annual losses – Retailers lose nearly $10 million yearly from IT outages, with 31% reporting costs exceeding $500,000 per hour, yet 39% don’t track these losses
- 6-minute patience window – Customers abandon purchases after 6 minutes of disruption, but average retail outages last 4 hours with 55% taking over 30 minutes just to detect problems
- Weekly outages epidemic – 37% of retailers face high-impact outages weekly, with 47% citing network visibility as their top improvement need despite 73% already using traditional monitoring tools
Fill out the form to read the report now and learn more about the state of retail IT observability in 2025, and find out how businesses can ensure that establishing a correct observability process provides demonstrable return on investment figures with our ROI calculator.
Highlight integrates more than 85 different vendor services via API and SNMP:
Hyper-relevant alerting
Eliminate alert fatigue with intelligent, customizable notifications that target the right teams for the right issues at the right sensitivity levels.
- Quickly target specific technologies, issue types, locations and teams
- Eliminate false-positive alerts with adjustable sensitivity
- Catch short-duration issues with ultrafast 1-minute polling
Unified cross-technology reporting
Consolidate performance data from all your retail technology stack into a single source of truth for faster, more confident decision-making.
- Produce consistent reports no matter the technology
- Access historical reporting data
- Reduce report production time
- Save unnecessary budget expenditure
Industry Report: The State of Retail IT Observability in 2025
Our new retail IT research reveals that poor network observability costs retailers $9.95 million annually — yet most don’t realize the scale of their losses. Read our comprehensive 2025 report to discover how retailers are transforming IT from cost centre to profit driver via observability.