Observability Contract Job Trends in the North West

Observability
England > North West

The table below provides summary statistics and contractor rates for jobs advertised in the North West requiring Observability skills. It covers contract job vacancies from the 6 months leading up to 19 December 2025, with comparisons to the same periods in the previous two years.

6 months to
19 Dec 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 97 95 113
Rank change year-on-year -2 +18 +59
Contract jobs citing Observability 52 28 26
As % of all contract jobs in the North West 2.08% 1.29% 0.99%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 2.35% 1.49% 1.11%
Number of daily rates quoted 37 11 14
10th Percentile £313 £484 £454
25th Percentile £363 £525 £469
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £492 £568 £538
Median % change year-on-year -13.30% +5.58% -
75th Percentile £613 £638 £610
90th Percentile £650 - £642
England median daily rate £550 £614 £600
% change year-on-year -10.39% +2.29% -
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 1 1
10th Percentile £42.58 - -
25th Percentile £47.15 £82.50 £58.75
Median hourly rate £56.34 £85.00 £60.00
Median % change year-on-year -33.71% +41.67% -
75th Percentile £63.96 £87.50 £61.25
90th Percentile £67.58 - -
England median hourly rate £56.00 £85.00 £69.00
% change year-on-year -34.12% +23.19% -

All Process and Methodology Skills
North West

Observability falls under the Processes and Methodologies category. For comparison with the information above, the following table provides summary statistics for all contract job vacancies requiring process or methodology skills in the North West.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 2,213 1,874 2,344
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West 88.38% 86.48% 89.13%
Number of daily rates quoted 1,448 1,055 1,596
10th Percentile £213 £265 £295
25th Percentile £358 £390 £408
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £450 £475 £500
Median % change year-on-year -5.26% -5.00% -
75th Percentile £567 £575 £600
90th Percentile £650 £656 £688
England median daily rate £505 £525 £544
% change year-on-year -3.81% -3.49% -1.09%
Number of hourly rates quoted 195 108 157
10th Percentile £16.41 £16.00 £15.75
25th Percentile £20.63 £21.20 £18.00
Median hourly rate £31.50 £31.25 £35.50
Median % change year-on-year +0.80% -11.97% +33.81%
75th Percentile £51.76 £51.91 £46.88
90th Percentile £69.78 £68.65 £65.00
England median hourly rate £25.15 £35.00 £44.50
% change year-on-year -28.14% -21.35% +19.70%

Observability
Job Vacancy Trend in the North West

Historical trend showing the proportion of contract IT job postings citing Observability relative to all contract IT jobs advertised in the North West.

Observability job vacancy trend in the North West

Observability
Daily Rate Trend in the North West

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Observability.

Contractor daily rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Observability

Observability
Daily Rate Histogram in the North West

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Observability in the North West over the 6 months to 19 December 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Observability in the North West

Observability
Hourly Rate Trend in the North West

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Observability.

Contractor hourly rate distribution trend for jobs in the North West citing Observability

Observability
Hourly Rate Histogram in the North West

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Observability in the North West over the 6 months to 19 December 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Observability in the North West

Observability
Contract Job Locations in the North West

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Observability within the North West region over the 6 months to 19 December 2025. The 'Rank Change' column provides an indication of the change in demand within each location based on the same 6 month period last year.

Location Rank Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Matching
Contract
IT Job Ads
Median
Daily Rate
Past 6 Months
Median Daily Rate
% Change
on Same Period
Last Year
Live
Jobs
Manchester +5 31 £563 +2.27% 50
Cheshire -12 16 £360 -36.56% 27
Merseyside -11 4 £426 - 15
Lancashire - 1 - - 28
Observability
England

Observability
Co-Occurring Skills & Capabilities in the North West by Category

The following tables expand on the one above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. They cover the same employment type, locality and period, with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each category:

Application Platforms
1 4 (7.69%) Apache
1 4 (7.69%) OpenStack
2 2 (3.85%) Apache Airflow
2 2 (3.85%) JBoss
Applications
1 3 (5.77%) Chatbot
Cloud Services
1 28 (53.85%) AWS
2 21 (40.38%) Azure
3 15 (28.85%) GCP
4 11 (21.15%) AWS CloudFormation
4 11 (21.15%) OpenShift
5 10 (19.23%) GitHub
6 8 (15.38%) Datadog
6 8 (15.38%) GitHub Actions
7 6 (11.54%) Amazon CloudWatch
8 5 (9.62%) AWS Lambda
8 5 (9.62%) IaaS
8 5 (9.62%) PaaS
8 5 (9.62%) SaaS
8 5 (9.62%) Serverless
9 4 (7.69%) Pulumi
10 3 (5.77%) Amazon Bedrock
10 3 (5.77%) Amazon EC2
10 3 (5.77%) Amazon EKS
10 3 (5.77%) Azure AI
10 3 (5.77%) Vertex AI
Communications & Networking
1 12 (23.08%) Firewall
2 4 (7.69%) HTTP
2 4 (7.69%) Network Security
3 3 (5.77%) VPN
4 1 (1.92%) DNS
Database & Business Intelligence
1 7 (13.46%) PostgreSQL
1 7 (13.46%) Relational Database
2 3 (5.77%) Pinecone
2 3 (5.77%) Redis
3 2 (3.85%) Amazon RDS
3 2 (3.85%) Data Lake
3 2 (3.85%) Elasticsearch
3 2 (3.85%) RDBMS
Development Applications
1 15 (28.85%) GitLab
2 10 (19.23%) Jenkins
3 5 (9.62%) Git
4 2 (3.85%) Bitbucket Server
4 2 (3.85%) CA Release Automation
4 2 (3.85%) CircleCI
4 2 (3.85%) git-flow
4 2 (3.85%) JIRA
4 2 (3.85%) SonarQube
4 2 (3.85%) Sonatype Nexus
4 2 (3.85%) TeamCity
5 1 (1.92%) Cypress.io
5 1 (1.92%) Gradle
5 1 (1.92%) IntelliJ
5 1 (1.92%) Spinnaker
General
1 11 (21.15%) Social Skills
2 10 (19.23%) Finance
3 7 (13.46%) Games
4 5 (9.62%) Analytical Skills
5 4 (7.69%) Banking
5 4 (7.69%) Public Sector
Job Titles
1 11 (21.15%) Platform Engineer
2 8 (15.38%) Senior
3 6 (11.54%) DevOps Engineer
4 5 (9.62%) Security Engineer
4 5 (9.62%) Software Engineer
5 4 (7.69%) AWS Engineer
6 3 (5.77%) Artificial Intelligence Engineer
6 3 (5.77%) AWS DevOps
6 3 (5.77%) AWS DevOps Engineer
6 3 (5.77%) Developer
6 3 (5.77%) DevOps Specialist
6 3 (5.77%) Integration Engineer
6 3 (5.77%) Lead
6 3 (5.77%) Software Integration Engineer
6 3 (5.77%) Virtualisation Engineer
7 2 (3.85%) Architect
7 2 (3.85%) AWS Data Engineer
7 2 (3.85%) Java Engineer
7 2 (3.85%) Java Software Engineer
7 2 (3.85%) Senior Developer
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 14 (26.92%) Node.js
2 9 (17.31%) REST
3 7 (13.46%) Elastic Stack
4 5 (9.62%) AngularJS
5 4 (7.69%) CrewAI
5 4 (7.69%) OAuth
5 4 (7.69%) Spring Boot
6 3 (5.77%) LangChain
6 3 (5.77%) OAuth2
6 3 (5.77%) OpenID
7 2 (3.85%) NestJS
7 2 (3.85%) Next.js
7 2 (3.85%) RESTful
7 2 (3.85%) Spring
8 1 (1.92%) Flask
8 1 (1.92%) GraphQL
8 1 (1.92%) Jest
8 1 (1.92%) Playwright
8 1 (1.92%) React
8 1 (1.92%) Swagger
Miscellaneous
1 4 (7.69%) Data Protection Act
2 3 (5.77%) AI Agents
2 3 (5.77%) Autonomous Agent
3 2 (3.85%) Cloud Native
4 1 (1.92%) Distributed Systems
4 1 (1.92%) Onboarding
4 1 (1.92%) PKI
4 1 (1.92%) Product Ownership
Operating Systems
1 22 (42.31%) Linux
2 8 (15.38%) Windows
3 4 (7.69%) Unix
4 3 (5.77%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Processes & Methodologies
1 30 (57.69%) CI/CD
1 30 (57.69%) DevOps
2 25 (48.08%) Infrastructure as Code
3 24 (46.15%) Containerisation
4 11 (21.15%) Platform Engineering
4 11 (21.15%) Site Reliability Engineering
5 9 (17.31%) Cloud Security
5 9 (17.31%) Problem-Solving
6 8 (15.38%) Agile
6 8 (15.38%) Analytics
6 8 (15.38%) Incident Response
7 7 (13.46%) Code Quality
7 7 (13.46%) ETL
7 7 (13.46%) Microservices
8 6 (11.54%) Infrastructure Automation
8 6 (11.54%) Software Engineering
9 5 (9.62%) AI
9 5 (9.62%) Data Pipeline
9 5 (9.62%) DevSecOps
9 5 (9.62%) Task Automation
Programming Languages
1 28 (53.85%) Python
2 12 (23.08%) Bash
3 8 (15.38%) TypeScript
4 5 (9.62%) Java
4 5 (9.62%) PHP
4 5 (9.62%) SQL
5 4 (7.69%) Go
6 3 (5.77%) JavaScript
7 2 (3.85%) Bicep
7 2 (3.85%) Perl
7 2 (3.85%) PowerShell
7 2 (3.85%) Ruby
8 1 (1.92%) C#
8 1 (1.92%) Kotlin
Qualifications
1 9 (17.31%) Security Cleared
2 5 (9.62%) SC Cleared
3 4 (7.69%) BPSS Clearance
3 4 (7.69%) CISM
3 4 (7.69%) CISSP
4 3 (5.77%) MCP
5 1 (1.92%) Azure Certification
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 5 (9.62%) ISO/IEC 27001
1 5 (9.62%) NIST
2 3 (5.77%) Accessibility
2 3 (5.77%) QA
3 1 (1.92%) GDPR
3 1 (1.92%) PCI DSS
3 1 (1.92%) SLA
3 1 (1.92%) SOC 1
3 1 (1.92%) WCAG
System Software
1 25 (48.08%) Docker
2 4 (7.69%) VMware Infrastructure
2 4 (7.69%) vSphere
3 2 (3.85%) Active Directory
Systems Management
1 30 (57.69%) Kubernetes
2 21 (40.38%) Terraform
3 16 (30.77%) Grafana
4 12 (23.08%) Prometheus
5 4 (7.69%) Fluentd
6 2 (3.85%) Kibana
6 2 (3.85%) Progress Chef
7 1 (1.92%) Ansible
7 1 (1.92%) Istio
7 1 (1.92%) Single Sign-On
Vendors
1 7 (13.46%) AppDynamics
1 7 (13.46%) Splunk
2 5 (9.62%) Oracle
3 4 (7.69%) Cribl.io
3 4 (7.69%) F5
3 4 (7.69%) Google
3 4 (7.69%) Microsoft
3 4 (7.69%) Palo Alto
3 4 (7.69%) VMware
4 3 (5.77%) Cloudera
5 2 (3.85%) Ping Identity
5 2 (3.85%) Red Hat
6 1 (1.92%) Dynatrace
6 1 (1.92%) OpenAI