Observability Contracts in the UK excluding London

Observability
UK > UK excluding London

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies advertised in the UK excluding London requiring Observability skills. It includes a benchmarking guide to the contractor rates offered in vacancies that cited Observability over the 6 months leading up to 1 May 2025, comparing them to the same period in the previous two years.

6 months to
1 May 2025
Same period 2024 Same period 2023
Rank 255 315 347
Rank change year-on-year +60 +32 +133
Contract jobs citing Observability 81 84 116
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 0.63% 0.40% 0.48%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 0.70% 0.48% 0.54%
Number of daily rates quoted 60 60 67
10th Percentile £393 £448 £439
25th Percentile £420 £511 £478
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £550 £531 £538
Median % change year-on-year +3.53% -1.25% -10.33%
75th Percentile £677 £825 £550
90th Percentile £753 - £643
UK median daily rate £560 £550 £575
% change year-on-year +1.82% -4.35% -11.54%
Number of hourly rates quoted 0 1 2
10th Percentile - - £71.25
25th Percentile - £58.75 £72.38
Median hourly rate - £60.00 £75.50
Median % change year-on-year - -20.53% -
75th Percentile - £61.25 £77.38
90th Percentile - - £77.75
UK median hourly rate £57.25 £60.00 £78.00
% change year-on-year -4.58% -23.08% -

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK excluding London

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 UK excluding London.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 11,543 17,602 21,544
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London 90.42% 84.74% 89.52%
Number of daily rates quoted 7,249 10,520 14,947
10th Percentile £235 £250 £255
25th Percentile £375 £380 £400
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £483 £500 £500
Median % change year-on-year -3.50% - +5.26%
75th Percentile £588 £600 £600
90th Percentile £662 £688 £688
UK median daily rate £520 £525 £550
% change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% +4.76%
Number of hourly rates quoted 825 2,048 1,307
10th Percentile £14.20 £12.33 £11.00
25th Percentile £17.30 £15.28 £16.00
Median hourly rate £27.50 £37.34 £36.00
Median % change year-on-year -26.35% +3.72% +80.00%
75th Percentile £64.50 £60.00 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £72.98
UK median hourly rate £29.00 £35.65 £37.30
% change year-on-year -18.65% -4.42% +49.20%

Observability
Job Vacancy Trend in the UK excluding London

Job postings citing Observability as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised in the UK excluding London.

Job vacancy trend for Observability in the UK excluding London

Observability
Contractor Daily Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Observability in the UK excluding London.

Daily rate trend for Observability in the UK excluding London

Observability
Daily Rate Histogram in the UK excluding London

Daily rate distribution for jobs citing Observability in the UK excluding London over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Daily rate histogram for Observability in the UK excluding London

Observability
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend in the UK excluding London

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Observability in the UK excluding London.

Hourly rate trend for Observability in the UK excluding London

Observability
Contract Job Locations in the UK excluding London

The table below looks at the demand and provides a guide to the median contractor rates quoted in IT jobs citing Observability within the UK excluding London region over the 6 months to 1 May 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
North of England +23 33 £713 +35.71% 82
Yorkshire +20 21 £725 +28.89% 26
Scotland +8 19 £486 -6.85% 20
South East +50 11 £350 -56.25% 88
Midlands +32 11 £537 - 23
West Midlands +23 10 £544 - 15
North West +7 10 £563 +7.40% 48
South West +28 5 £625 -21.88% 19
North East - 2 £750 - 8
East Midlands - 1 £358 - 6
Wales - 1 £586 - 1
East of England - 1 £420 - 17
Observability
UK

Observability
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities in the UK excluding London by Category

The follow tables expand on the table above by listing co-occurrences grouped by category. The same employment type, locality and period is covered with up to 20 co-occurrences shown in each of the following categories:

Application Platforms
1 10 (12.35%) nginx
2 7 (8.64%) Traefik
3 5 (6.17%) Apache Spark
4 3 (3.70%) Apache
4 3 (3.70%) JBoss
5 2 (2.47%) Confluence
6 1 (1.23%) SAS
Business Applications
1 1 (1.23%) Distributed Ledger
1 1 (1.23%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 31 (38.27%) AWS
2 25 (30.86%) OpenShift
3 20 (24.69%) Azure
4 12 (14.81%) AWS CloudFormation
5 11 (13.58%) Amazon CloudWatch
5 11 (13.58%) Amazon S3
6 10 (12.35%) Cloud Computing
6 10 (12.35%) Entra ID
7 9 (11.11%) Amazon ECS
7 9 (11.11%) AWS Fargate
7 9 (11.11%) Virtual Private Cloud
8 8 (9.88%) SaaS
9 7 (8.64%) Collibra
10 6 (7.41%) Azure DevOps
10 6 (7.41%) GCP
11 5 (6.17%) Cohesity
11 5 (6.17%) GitHub
11 5 (6.17%) Serverless
12 4 (4.94%) Amazon OpenSearch
12 4 (4.94%) Apigee
Communications & Networking
1 12 (14.81%) SAN
2 11 (13.58%) NAS
3 9 (11.11%) DNS
3 9 (11.11%) TCP/IP
4 2 (2.47%) Firewall
5 1 (1.23%) Fibre Channel
5 1 (1.23%) iSCSI
Database & Business Intelligence
1 10 (12.35%) MongoDB
2 4 (4.94%) Big Data
3 3 (3.70%) Amazon Redshift
3 3 (3.70%) Elasticsearch
3 3 (3.70%) Hadoop
3 3 (3.70%) RDBMS
3 3 (3.70%) Relational Database
4 2 (2.47%) BigQuery
4 2 (2.47%) NoSQL
4 2 (2.47%) PostgreSQL
4 2 (2.47%) SQL Server
5 1 (1.23%) Amazon RDS
5 1 (1.23%) Apache Cassandra
5 1 (1.23%) Azure SQL Database
5 1 (1.23%) DB2
5 1 (1.23%) Redis
Development Applications
1 36 (44.44%) Jenkins
2 17 (20.99%) GitLab
3 16 (19.75%) Git
4 7 (8.64%) JIRA
5 4 (4.94%) Atlassian Bamboo
6 3 (3.70%) Bitbucket Server
6 3 (3.70%) CA Release Automation
6 3 (3.70%) SonarQube
6 3 (3.70%) Sonatype Nexus
6 3 (3.70%) TeamCity
7 2 (2.47%) Bitbucket
7 2 (2.47%) CircleCI
7 2 (2.47%) Cypress.io
8 1 (1.23%) Gradle
8 1 (1.23%) Maven
General
1 19 (23.46%) Social Skills
2 13 (16.05%) Banking
3 12 (14.81%) Analytical Skills
4 7 (8.64%) Finance
5 5 (6.17%) Documentation Skills
6 4 (4.94%) Public Sector
7 2 (2.47%) Military
7 2 (2.47%) Tech for Good
7 2 (2.47%) Wholesale Banking
8 1 (1.23%) Electronics
8 1 (1.23%) Legal
8 1 (1.23%) Manufacturing
8 1 (1.23%) Marketing
8 1 (1.23%) Telecoms
Job Titles
1 17 (20.99%) Architect
2 16 (19.75%) DevOps Engineer
3 13 (16.05%) Senior
4 8 (9.88%) Senior DevOps
5 7 (8.64%) Developer
6 6 (7.41%) AWS DevOps
6 6 (7.41%) Platform Engineer
7 5 (6.17%) Data Architect
7 5 (6.17%) Infrastructure Engineer
7 5 (6.17%) Python Engineer
7 5 (6.17%) Senior DevOps Engineer
8 4 (4.94%) AWS Engineer
8 4 (4.94%) Data Engineer
8 4 (4.94%) Lead
9 3 (3.70%) Applications Support
9 3 (3.70%) Automation Engineer
9 3 (3.70%) AWS DevOps Engineer
9 3 (3.70%) NetBackup Engineer
9 3 (3.70%) Software Engineer
9 3 (3.70%) Solutions Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 19 (23.46%) Kafka
2 10 (12.35%) Keycloak
2 10 (12.35%) OpenTelemetry
3 9 (11.11%) cloud-init
3 9 (11.11%) Elastic Stack
4 5 (6.17%) Spring Boot
5 4 (4.94%) YAML
6 3 (3.70%) .NET
6 3 (3.70%) Loki
6 3 (3.70%) Node.js
6 3 (3.70%) PySpark
6 3 (3.70%) Swagger
7 2 (2.47%) .NET Framework
7 2 (2.47%) AWS CDK
7 2 (2.47%) GraphQL
7 2 (2.47%) OpenAPI
7 2 (2.47%) Playwright
7 2 (2.47%) Puppeteer
7 2 (2.47%) React
7 2 (2.47%) REST
Miscellaneous
1 9 (11.11%) Cloud Native
1 9 (11.11%) PKI
2 5 (6.17%) Public Cloud
3 3 (3.70%) Distributed Systems
4 2 (2.47%) Legacy Applications
4 2 (2.47%) Management Information System
4 2 (2.47%) Onboarding
4 2 (2.47%) Private Cloud
4 2 (2.47%) Product Ownership
4 2 (2.47%) Renewable Energy
4 2 (2.47%) Self-Motivation
5 1 (1.23%) Blockchain
5 1 (1.23%) Client/Server
5 1 (1.23%) Data Protection Act
5 1 (1.23%) EMC VMAX
5 1 (1.23%) Enterprise Software
5 1 (1.23%) Enterprise Storage
5 1 (1.23%) Hybrid Cloud
5 1 (1.23%) NVMe
Operating Systems
1 27 (33.33%) Linux
2 23 (28.40%) Unix
3 21 (25.93%) Windows
4 14 (17.28%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
5 11 (13.58%) Windows Server
6 9 (11.11%) CentOS
7 1 (1.23%) Data ONTAP
7 1 (1.23%) Mac OS
Processes & Methodologies
1 53 (65.43%) CI/CD
2 43 (53.09%) DevOps
3 32 (39.51%) Infrastructure as Code
4 20 (24.69%) Microservices
5 17 (20.99%) Site Reliability Engineering
6 16 (19.75%) Containerisation
7 15 (18.52%) Cloud Security
7 15 (18.52%) Continuous Integration
8 14 (17.28%) Agile
8 14 (17.28%) Problem-Solving
9 12 (14.81%) Decision-Making
9 12 (14.81%) Software Engineering
9 12 (14.81%) Test Automation
10 11 (13.58%) Data Protection
10 11 (13.58%) Identity Management
10 11 (13.58%) Incident Management
10 11 (13.58%) Task Automation
11 10 (12.35%) Data Deduplication
11 10 (12.35%) Secrets Management
12 9 (11.11%) Static Application Security Testing
Programming Languages
1 41 (50.62%) Python
2 13 (16.05%) Bash
3 11 (13.58%) Go
4 9 (11.11%) Java
4 9 (11.11%) SQL
5 4 (4.94%) C#
5 4 (4.94%) Perl
6 3 (3.70%) Bicep
6 3 (3.70%) PowerShell
6 3 (3.70%) TypeScript
7 2 (2.47%) JavaScript
8 1 (1.23%) Groovy
8 1 (1.23%) Shell Script
Qualifications
1 20 (24.69%) Security Cleared
2 16 (19.75%) SC Cleared
3 11 (13.58%) AWS Certification
4 3 (3.70%) DV Cleared
5 2 (2.47%) Degree
5 2 (2.47%) ITIL Certification
6 1 (1.23%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 1 (1.23%) Azure Certification
6 1 (1.23%) BPSS Clearance
6 1 (1.23%) CCNP
6 1 (1.23%) Cisco Certification
6 1 (1.23%) CISM
6 1 (1.23%) CISSP
6 1 (1.23%) CSSLP
6 1 (1.23%) JNCIP
6 1 (1.23%) Master's Degree
6 1 (1.23%) VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 9 (11.11%) NCSC
2 2 (2.47%) Disclosure Scotland
2 2 (2.47%) QA
3 1 (1.23%) COBIT
3 1 (1.23%) Data Quality
3 1 (1.23%) GRC
System Software
1 19 (23.46%) Docker
2 5 (6.17%) Active Directory
3 3 (3.70%) Veritas Cluster Server
3 3 (3.70%) VMware Infrastructure
4 1 (1.23%) GPFS
4 1 (1.23%) NFS
Systems Management
1 50 (61.73%) Kubernetes
2 36 (44.44%) Terraform
3 31 (38.27%) Grafana
4 29 (35.80%) Prometheus
5 20 (24.69%) Ansible
6 10 (12.35%) Consul
6 10 (12.35%) HAProxy
6 10 (12.35%) NetBackup
6 10 (12.35%) Oracle RMAN
6 10 (12.35%) Packer
7 9 (11.11%) Istio
7 9 (11.11%) Jamf Pro
7 9 (11.11%) linkerd
7 9 (11.11%) Rancher
7 9 (11.11%) ZABBIX
8 5 (6.17%) Progress Chef
9 3 (3.70%) Kibana
10 2 (2.47%) Control-M
10 2 (2.47%) Puppet
11 1 (1.23%) Nagios
Vendors
1 29 (35.80%) Splunk
2 14 (17.28%) Veritas
3 9 (11.11%) AppDynamics
3 9 (11.11%) Okta
4 8 (9.88%) Dynatrace
5 7 (8.64%) Apple
5 7 (8.64%) ESET
6 6 (7.41%) Red Hat
7 5 (6.17%) Google
8 4 (4.94%) Microsoft
8 4 (4.94%) VMware
9 3 (3.70%) BMC
9 3 (3.70%) Cloudera
9 3 (3.70%) IBM
9 3 (3.70%) PagerDuty
9 3 (3.70%) ServiceNow
10 2 (2.47%) EMC
10 2 (2.47%) NetApp
11 1 (1.23%) Ariba
11 1 (1.23%) Remedy