NFE Capability Pillars | Testhouse
82%
of organisations report MTTR for production incidents exceeding one hour in 2024
Observability Pulse 2024
4×
median ROI from a mature observability investment vs no observability
New Relic 2024 Observability Forecast
2×
slower incident detection and response without full-stack observability in place
New Relic FSI 2024
25–50%
of FSI engineering time spent addressing outages rather than innovation
New Relic FSI 2024

You Can't Fix What you Can't See or Predict.

82% of organisations in 2024 reported MTTR for production incidents exceeding one hour — and this figure is trending in the wrong direction despite growing tool investment. The problem isn't a lack of monitoring data. It's a lack of actionable, business-aligned observability. The median ROI from a mature observability investment is 4× (New Relic 2024). Our Observability pillar — including our PEaS (Performance Engineering as a Service) model — transforms your operational data from a reactive fire-fighting tool into a proactive revenue protection system. Full-stack visibility that connects system health to customer experience and business outcomes.


What's at Risk Without It
82%
of MTTR durations exceed 1 hour in 2024 — up from 47% in 2021. The observability gap is widening as systems grow more complex
25–50%
Financial services engineering teams spend 25–50% of their time addressing outages — time not spent on innovation or growth
2×
Without full-stack observability, FSI organisations detect and respond to high-impact outages 2× slower than those with mature observability (New Relic FSI 2024)
10+
Tool sprawl and siloed monitoring creates alert fatigue and blind spots — organisations often learn of major incidents from customers, not their own systems
What We Deliver

PEaS — Performance Engineering as a Service

Our APM-led managed service delivers continuous performance engineering without the overhead of building an in-house capability. A dedicated performance engineer embedded as a service, with full tooling and reporting included.

APM Setup & Optimisation

Deployment, configuration, and tuning of Application Performance Monitoring platforms — Dynatrace, New Relic, Datadog, AppDynamics — aligned to your business-critical transaction flows and SLOs, not just technical metrics

Full-Stack Observability

Unified observability across infrastructure (CPU, network, storage), application (traces, errors, latency), and user experience (Core Web Vitals, real user sessions) — providing a single source of truth for operational health.

SRE Support & Practice

Site Reliability Engineering support — from SLO definition and error budget management through to on-call runbook automation and post-incident review processes that create learning, not blame.

Business Outcomes We Deliver
85%
MTTR reduction — from 30min to 5min

Lenovo achieved an 85% MTTR reduction through full-stack observability, maintaining 100% uptime during their peak e-commerce period and directly protecting sales.

4×
Median ROI on observability investment

New Relic's 2024 Observability Forecast found that 58% of organisations receive $5M+ in annual value from observability, with a median 295% ROI across all respondents.

60%
Reduction in downtime incidents

Proactive anomaly detection and predictive alerting identifies emerging issues before they breach SLOs — shifting from reactive fire-fighting to proactive prevention.

20%
Increase in conversion rates

Linking observability to real user experience data identifies performance degradations directly impacting conversion — and resolves them before they cost revenue.

Client Outcome — E-Commerce Retail

Retailer Cuts MTTR by 83% and Protects £12M During Peak Trading

A major UK e-commerce retailer was heading into their largest ever trading season with fragmented monitoring across 14 separate tools and no business-aligned alerting. Our observability team consolidated their toolchain into a unified Dynatrace deployment, mapped real user sessions to revenue metrics, and built automated runbooks for their five most common incident types — resolving issues without engineering intervention.

Read the full case study
NFE Maturity Model — Where Does Your Organisation Sit?
Maturity Level Performance Reliability Security Observability Business Risk
Level 1 — Reactive Ad-hoc testing before release No DR testing Annual pen test only Siloed server monitoring High — incidents discovered by customers
Level 2 — Defined Load tests in staging DR plan exists, untested SAST in pipeline APM on key apps Moderate — issues caught late, costly to fix
Level 3 — Proactive Perf gates in CI/CD Chaos experiments quarterly SAST + DAST in pipeline Full-stack observability Low — issues caught early, rapidly resolved
Level 4 — Continuous Real-time CX + capacity AI Continuous chaos + SLO error budgets Security as code, always-on VAPT AI-powered anomaly prediction Minimal — revenue-protective, regulation-ready
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Common Questions About Observability

Answers to the questions we hear most often from engineering, operations, and technology leaders.

We already have monitoring tools in place. How is observability different?
Monitoring tells you when something is broken. Observability tells you why, and ideally warns you before it breaks. Most organisations have siloed monitoring across multiple tools with no unified view and no connection to business outcomes. We consolidate that into full-stack observability aligned to your SLOs and revenue metrics, so you're responding to signal rather than drowning in alert noise.
What does PEaS (Performance Engineering as a Service) actually include?
PEaS is a managed service model where a dedicated performance engineer is embedded as a continuous capability, rather than as a one-off engagement. It includes APM deployment and tuning, ongoing performance analysis, SLO reporting, incident support, and capacity forecasting. It's designed for organisations that need the outcome of an in-house performance engineering function without the overhead of building one.
Which observability platforms do you work with?
We are platform-agnostic but have deep implementation expertise across Dynatrace, New Relic, Datadog, and AppDynamics. We configure them to track what matters to your business—like customer-facing transaction flows and revenue-impacting journeys, not just raw infrastructure metrics.
How quickly can observability improvements reduce our MTTR?
The impact can be significant and fast. Lenovo achieved an 85% MTTR reduction through full-stack observability implementation, and one of our UK retail clients cut MTTR by 83% ahead of their peak trading season. The typical driver is replacing manual incident triage with automated runbooks and business-aligned alerting, resolving common incident types without engineering intervention.
NFE Capability Pillars

Find Out Which Pillar Deserves Your Attention First

Our free NFE Maturity Assessment takes less than 2 weeks and gives you a clear, prioritised view of your non-functional risk exposure — and a roadmap to address it.

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