Observability Contracts

Observability
UK

The table below provides summary statistics for contract job vacancies 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 266 349 459
Rank change year-on-year +83 +110 +173
Contract jobs citing Observability 284 241 265
As % of all contract jobs advertised in the UK 0.97% 0.55% 0.44%
As % of the Processes & Methodologies category 1.07% 0.64% 0.49%
Number of daily rates quoted 191 179 158
10th Percentile £400 £425 £450
25th Percentile £455 £505 £508
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £560 £550 £575
Median % change year-on-year +1.82% -4.35% -11.54%
75th Percentile £650 £825 £775
90th Percentile £750 - £950
UK excluding London median daily rate £550 £531 £538
% change year-on-year +3.53% -1.25% -10.33%
Number of hourly rates quoted 2 1 3
10th Percentile £42.08 - £72.00
25th Percentile £46.31 £58.75 £74.25
Median hourly rate £57.25 £60.00 £78.00
Median % change year-on-year -4.58% -23.08% -
75th Percentile £66.81 £61.25 £84.00
90th Percentile £70.23 - £87.60
UK excluding London median hourly rate - £60.00 £75.50
% change year-on-year - -20.53% -

All Process and Methodology Skills
UK

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.

Contract vacancies with a requirement for process or methodology skills 26,594 37,597 53,655
As % of all contract IT jobs advertised in the UK 90.84% 86.31% 89.91%
Number of daily rates quoted 17,149 24,227 37,238
10th Percentile £308 £300 £325
25th Percentile £413 £413 £438
Median daily rate (50th Percentile) £520 £525 £550
Median % change year-on-year -0.95% -4.55% +4.76%
75th Percentile £630 £638 £650
90th Percentile £743 £750 £750
UK excluding London median daily rate £483 £500 £500
% change year-on-year -3.50% - +5.26%
Number of hourly rates quoted 1,071 2,443 1,746
10th Percentile £14.41 £12.75 £11.00
25th Percentile £18.21 £16.00 £16.25
Median hourly rate £29.00 £35.65 £37.30
Median % change year-on-year -18.65% -4.42% +49.20%
75th Percentile £60.38 £59.98 £65.00
90th Percentile £75.00 £72.50 £75.00
UK excluding London median hourly rate £27.50 £37.34 £36.00
% change year-on-year -26.35% +3.72% +80.00%

Observability
Job Vacancy Trend

Job postings citing Observability as a proportion of all IT jobs advertised.

Job vacancy trend for Observability in the UK

Observability
Contractor Daily Rate Trend

3-month moving average daily rate quoted in jobs citing Observability.

Daily rate trend for Observability in the UK

Observability
Daily Rate Histogram

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

Daily rate histogram for Observability in the UK

Observability
Contractor Hourly Rate Trend

3-month moving average hourly rates quoted in jobs citing Observability.

Hourly rate trend for Observability in the UK

Observability
Hourly Rate Histogram

Hourly rate distribution of jobs citing Observability over the 6 months to 1 May 2025.

Hourly rate histogram for Observability in the UK

Observability
Top 16 Contract Locations

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 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
England +83 234 £574 +4.32% 488
London +48 143 £563 -2.17% 321
Work from Home +49 98 £570 +3.64% 293
UK excluding London +60 81 £550 +3.53% 242
North of England +23 33 £713 +35.71% 80
Yorkshire +20 21 £725 +28.89% 24
Scotland +8 19 £486 -6.85% 19
South East +50 11 £350 -56.25% 81
Midlands +32 11 £537 - 22
West Midlands +23 10 £544 - 14
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 - 16

Observability
Co-occurring Skills and Capabilities 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 23 (8.10%) Apache Spark
2 15 (5.28%) nginx
3 12 (4.23%) Traefik
4 9 (3.17%) Apache
5 6 (2.11%) Apache Airflow
5 6 (2.11%) Confluence
6 4 (1.41%) SAS
7 3 (1.06%) Alfresco
7 3 (1.06%) Camunda
7 3 (1.06%) JBoss
8 2 (0.70%) Jupyter
9 1 (0.35%) Apache Pulsar
9 1 (0.35%) MQSeries
Business Applications
1 3 (1.06%) Shopify
2 2 (0.70%) SAP BPC
3 1 (0.35%) Distributed Ledger
3 1 (0.35%) Remedy ITSM
Cloud Services
1 129 (45.42%) AWS
2 70 (24.65%) Azure
3 39 (13.73%) AWS CloudFormation
4 38 (13.38%) GCP
4 38 (13.38%) GitHub
5 36 (12.68%) Amazon CloudWatch
6 33 (11.62%) Datadog
7 31 (10.92%) OpenShift
8 28 (9.86%) Serverless
9 27 (9.51%) Amazon S3
10 25 (8.80%) GitHub Actions
11 24 (8.45%) Azure DevOps
12 23 (8.10%) Azure AKS
13 21 (7.39%) AWS Lambda
14 20 (7.04%) Amazon ECS
14 20 (7.04%) AWS Fargate
15 18 (6.34%) Virtual Private Cloud
16 17 (5.99%) SaaS
17 16 (5.63%) Entra ID
17 16 (5.63%) PaaS
Communications & Networking
1 32 (11.27%) DNS
2 23 (8.10%) TCP/IP
3 15 (5.28%) SAN
4 14 (4.93%) NAS
5 11 (3.87%) Firewall
6 8 (2.82%) Network Security
7 7 (2.46%) HTTP
8 6 (2.11%) Wireless
9 5 (1.76%) DHCP
10 4 (1.41%) LAN
10 4 (1.41%) SSL
10 4 (1.41%) VLAN
10 4 (1.41%) WLAN
11 3 (1.06%) Cisco Wireless
11 3 (1.06%) DOCSIS
11 3 (1.06%) VPN
11 3 (1.06%) WAN
11 3 (1.06%) Wi-Fi
12 2 (0.70%) DSL
12 2 (0.70%) Telnet
Database & Business Intelligence
1 26 (9.15%) Elasticsearch
2 24 (8.45%) MongoDB
3 21 (7.39%) Hadoop
4 19 (6.69%) Big Data
4 19 (6.69%) PostgreSQL
5 15 (5.28%) NoSQL
6 14 (4.93%) Relational Database
7 12 (4.23%) MySQL
8 9 (3.17%) SQL Server
9 8 (2.82%) Data Warehouse
10 6 (2.11%) Amazon Redshift
10 6 (2.11%) BigQuery
11 5 (1.76%) Amazon RDS
11 5 (1.76%) Data Lake
11 5 (1.76%) Looker
11 5 (1.76%) OLTP
12 4 (1.41%) Amazon Athena
12 4 (1.41%) InfluxDB
12 4 (1.41%) Redis
13 3 (1.06%) SAP HANA
Development Applications
1 86 (30.28%) Jenkins
2 54 (19.01%) GitLab
3 30 (10.56%) Git
4 17 (5.99%) JIRA
5 8 (2.82%) JUnit
6 7 (2.46%) Atlassian Bamboo
7 6 (2.11%) Bitbucket
7 6 (2.11%) CircleCI
8 5 (1.76%) SonarQube
9 4 (1.41%) Artifactory
9 4 (1.41%) Gradle
9 4 (1.41%) TeamCity
9 4 (1.41%) Terragrunt
10 3 (1.06%) Bitbucket Server
10 3 (1.06%) CA Release Automation
10 3 (1.06%) Maven
10 3 (1.06%) Sonatype Nexus
11 2 (0.70%) Cypress.io
11 2 (0.70%) JMeter
11 2 (0.70%) MLflow
General
1 80 (28.17%) Social Skills
2 51 (17.96%) Finance
3 43 (15.14%) Banking
4 29 (10.21%) Analytical Skills
5 19 (6.69%) Public Sector
6 8 (2.82%) Presentation Skills
6 8 (2.82%) Telecoms
7 6 (2.11%) Marketing
7 6 (2.11%) Military
8 5 (1.76%) Documentation Skills
8 5 (1.76%) Electronics
8 5 (1.76%) Manufacturing
9 4 (1.41%) Inclusion and Diversity
9 4 (1.41%) Investment Banking
9 4 (1.41%) Retail
10 2 (0.70%) Financial Institution
10 2 (0.70%) Tech for Good
10 2 (0.70%) Wholesale Banking
11 1 (0.35%) Influencing Skills
11 1 (0.35%) Pharmaceutical
Job Titles
1 53 (18.66%) Senior
2 47 (16.55%) DevOps Engineer
3 41 (14.44%) Architect
4 26 (9.15%) Developer
5 21 (7.39%) Site Reliability Engineer
6 20 (7.04%) Senior DevOps
7 18 (6.34%) Site Engineer
8 17 (5.99%) AWS Engineer
9 16 (5.63%) Data Engineer
9 16 (5.63%) Senior DevOps Engineer
10 15 (5.28%) Kubernetes Engineer
10 15 (5.28%) Lead
11 14 (4.93%) Python Engineer
11 14 (4.93%) Solutions Architect
12 12 (4.23%) AWS DevOps
13 11 (3.87%) Platform Engineer
14 9 (3.17%) AWS DevOps Engineer
14 9 (3.17%) Splunk Engineer
15 8 (2.82%) AWS Architect
16 7 (2.46%) AWS Solution Architect
Libraries, Frameworks & Software Standards
1 45 (15.85%) Kafka
1 45 (15.85%) OpenTelemetry
2 24 (8.45%) Elastic Stack
3 23 (8.10%) REST
4 18 (6.34%) Spring
5 17 (5.99%) Keycloak
6 16 (5.63%) Spring Boot
7 15 (5.28%) AngularJS
8 14 (4.93%) cloud-init
9 12 (4.23%) .NET
9 12 (4.23%) React
10 11 (3.87%) AWS CDK
11 10 (3.52%) GraphQL
11 10 (3.52%) JSON
11 10 (3.52%) YAML
12 9 (3.17%) Hibernate
12 9 (3.17%) HTML
12 9 (3.17%) JPA
13 8 (2.82%) Node.js
14 6 (2.11%) NumPy
Miscellaneous
1 39 (13.73%) Cloud Native
2 19 (6.69%) PKI
3 17 (5.99%) Distributed Systems
4 16 (5.63%) Onboarding
5 15 (5.28%) Public Cloud
6 10 (3.52%) Hybrid Cloud
7 9 (3.17%) Product Ownership
8 6 (2.11%) Data Protection Act
8 6 (2.11%) Video\Live Streaming
9 4 (1.41%) Data Centre
9 4 (1.41%) EMC VMAX
9 4 (1.41%) Enterprise Storage
9 4 (1.41%) Legacy Applications
9 4 (1.41%) Private Cloud
9 4 (1.41%) Replication
9 4 (1.41%) Self-Motivation
10 3 (1.06%) Distributed Applications
10 3 (1.06%) Embedded Systems
10 3 (1.06%) Management Information System
10 3 (1.06%) Virtual Team
Operating Systems
1 80 (28.17%) Linux
2 41 (14.44%) Red Hat Enterprise Linux
3 38 (13.38%) Unix
4 26 (9.15%) Windows
5 15 (5.28%) CentOS
6 12 (4.23%) Windows Server
7 5 (1.76%) Android
8 2 (0.70%) Mac OS
9 1 (0.35%) Amazon Linux
9 1 (0.35%) Data ONTAP
9 1 (0.35%) Debian
9 1 (0.35%) Ubuntu
9 1 (0.35%) VMS
Processes & Methodologies
1 156 (54.93%) CI/CD
2 138 (48.59%) DevOps
3 103 (36.27%) Infrastructure as Code
4 68 (23.94%) Microservices
5 64 (22.54%) Agile
6 58 (20.42%) Containerisation
7 57 (20.07%) Site Reliability Engineering
8 56 (19.72%) Problem-Solving
9 43 (15.14%) Test Automation
10 38 (13.38%) Software Engineering
11 34 (11.97%) Migration
12 31 (10.92%) Analytics
13 30 (10.56%) Cloud Security
14 28 (9.86%) Continuous Integration
14 28 (9.86%) Stakeholder Management
15 26 (9.15%) Incident Response
16 24 (8.45%) Mentoring
17 23 (8.10%) Artificial Intelligence
17 23 (8.10%) Event-Driven
18 22 (7.75%) High Availability
Programming Languages
1 120 (42.25%) Python
2 40 (14.08%) Java
3 38 (13.38%) Go
4 37 (13.03%) Bash
5 36 (12.68%) SQL
6 18 (6.34%) PowerShell
7 15 (5.28%) JavaScript
8 13 (4.58%) Bicep
8 13 (4.58%) TypeScript
9 11 (3.87%) C#
10 8 (2.82%) Kusto Query Language
11 4 (1.41%) Groovy
11 4 (1.41%) Perl
11 4 (1.41%) Shell Script
12 3 (1.06%) C
12 3 (1.06%) C++
12 3 (1.06%) Scala
13 2 (0.70%) Kotlin
13 2 (0.70%) Ruby
14 1 (0.35%) PHP
Qualifications
1 55 (19.37%) Security Cleared
2 44 (15.49%) SC Cleared
3 32 (11.27%) AWS Certification
4 11 (3.87%) Degree
5 8 (2.82%) AWS Certified Solutions Architect
6 6 (2.11%) DV Cleared
7 5 (1.76%) OCP
7 5 (1.76%) Oracle Certification
8 4 (1.41%) CCNP
8 4 (1.41%) Cisco Certification
9 3 (1.06%) CISSP
9 3 (1.06%) Computer Science Degree
9 3 (1.06%) Master's Degree
10 2 (0.70%) AWS Certified DevOps Engineer
10 2 (0.70%) Azure Certification
10 2 (0.70%) CCIE
10 2 (0.70%) CISM
10 2 (0.70%) ITIL Certification
11 1 (0.35%) CEH
11 1 (0.35%) JNCIP
Quality Assurance & Compliance
1 14 (4.93%) NCSC
2 10 (3.52%) QA
3 6 (2.11%) Data Quality
4 5 (1.76%) Accessibility
5 3 (1.06%) GDPR
5 3 (1.06%) ISO/IEC 27001
5 3 (1.06%) SLA
6 2 (0.70%) Disclosure Scotland
6 2 (0.70%) GRC
6 2 (0.70%) HIPAA
7 1 (0.35%) COBIT
7 1 (0.35%) ISO/IEC 27002 (supersedes ISO/IEC 17799)
7 1 (0.35%) SOC 2
7 1 (0.35%) WCAG
System Software
1 61 (21.48%) Docker
2 8 (2.82%) VMware Infrastructure
3 6 (2.11%) Active Directory
3 6 (2.11%) Veritas Cluster Server
4 3 (1.06%) Lustre
4 3 (1.06%) Virtual Machines
5 2 (0.70%) Apache ZooKeeper
5 2 (0.70%) FreeRADIUS
5 2 (0.70%) HDFS
5 2 (0.70%) iptables
6 1 (0.35%) GPFS
6 1 (0.35%) NFS
Systems Management
1 143 (50.35%) Kubernetes
2 122 (42.96%) Terraform
3 94 (33.10%) Grafana
4 70 (24.65%) Ansible
4 70 (24.65%) Prometheus
5 20 (7.04%) Argo
6 17 (5.99%) Consul
6 17 (5.99%) Packer
7 16 (5.63%) Istio
7 16 (5.63%) linkerd
7 16 (5.63%) ZABBIX
8 15 (5.28%) HAProxy
8 15 (5.28%) Rancher
9 14 (4.93%) Jamf Pro
10 10 (3.52%) NetBackup
10 10 (3.52%) Oracle RMAN
11 9 (3.17%) Puppet
12 8 (2.82%) Progress Chef
13 7 (2.46%) Kibana
14 5 (1.76%) Podman
Vendors
1 76 (26.76%) Splunk
2 17 (5.99%) Dynatrace
2 17 (5.99%) Veritas
3 15 (5.28%) Microsoft
4 14 (4.93%) Okta
4 14 (4.93%) Red Hat
4 14 (4.93%) ServiceNow
5 13 (4.58%) AppDynamics
5 13 (4.58%) Google
5 13 (4.58%) Oracle
6 12 (4.23%) Apple
6 12 (4.23%) ESET
7 11 (3.87%) SAP
7 11 (3.87%) VMware
8 9 (3.17%) Cisco
9 6 (2.11%) Fortinet
9 6 (2.11%) New Relic
10 5 (1.76%) F5
10 5 (1.76%) Infoblox
10 5 (1.76%) MuleSoft