GigaOm Radar for Network Observabilityv1.0

1. Summary

Network observability is a category of platforms and tools that go beyond device-centric network monitoring to provide truly relevant, end-to-end visibility and intelligence for all the traffic in your network, no matter whether on-premises, in the cloud, or anywhere else. A step beyond network performance monitoring, network observability guarantees visibility and distinguishes itself with actionable insights. These insights shift many low-level decision-making activities—such as troubleshooting or capacity planning—from engineers to the network observability tool.

Observability tools are less about specialization and more about consolidating a comprehensive experience in a single tool. This brings numerous advantages, including a better user experience, lower costs than those faced when deploying multiple tools, adaptability for complex IT environments, future-proofing, and cohesiveness across IT departments. Network observability is perhaps the only way to ensure that modern critical infrastructure achieves the required uptime and availability.

While businesses of all sizes can benefit from the end-to-end visibility offered by network observability tools, the ones likely to see the most improvement are those with large, complex networks. These can be either companies with proprietary networks, where IT plays a supporting role-—such as retail or manufacturing—or businesses that sell network services, such as communication service providers. We explore these categories in more depth in the following section.

This report looks at key vendors in the emerging network observability space and aims to equip IT decision-makers with the required information to select suitable providers according to their specific needs. We analyze the vendors on a set of key criteria and evaluation metrics, which are described in depth in the Key Criteria Report for Network Observability.