Observability solutions are less about specialization and more about consolidating a comprehensive experience in a single tool. This convergence of functionality brings numerous advantages, including a better user experience, lower costs than those incurred when deploying multiple tools, adaptability for complex IT environments, future-proofing, and cohesiveness across IT departments. Network observability is a key ingredient for ensuring that your 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 solutions, those with large, complex networks are likely to see the most improvement. These can be companies with proprietary networks, for which 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 is our fourth year evaluating the network observability space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

This GigaOm Radar report examines 20 of the top network observability solutions in the market, and compares offerings against the capabilities (table stakes, key features, and emerging features) and non-functional requirements (business criteria) outlined in the companion Key Criteria report. Together, these reports provide an overview of the category and its underlying technology, identify leading network observability offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.

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Network observability is a next-generation technology that stems from traditional monitoring and management. Instead of revolutionizing traditional network monitoring, network observability focuses on incremental developments and maturity. Leveraging developments from other areas of technology—such as machine learning (ML), AI operations (AIOps), and infrastructure as code (IaC)—network observability moves toward an automated and intelligent way of maintaining high-performance and low-cost network operations.

Between a lack of actionable insights available and limited interoperability among systems, network operations teams historically have had to conduct manual processes for root cause analysis (RCA), exporting data into spreadsheets for visualization, and checking for performance degradations and correlations.

These manual processes became even more complex as enterprises underwent cloud transformations—the most significant change to network infrastructure in the past decade. Organizations have migrated away from on-premises environments with a few devices hosted in co-location data centers to complex hybrid cloud environments. Network observability tools must monitor physical links and devices as well as virtual networking constructs and networking infrastructure delivered and managed by third-party suppliers.

Observability helps teams better deal with multiple environments, providing a high-level view of the network while picking up relevant details to extract actionable insights. Compared to network performance monitoring, network observability offers value from two perspectives:

• Better use of IT resources: When the network can answer questions about itself, IT professionals no longer have to hunt for the right information, generate reports, or perform manual troubleshooting. Instead, they can leverage their skills and talents toward proactive decision-making and other higher-value activities.
• Business-oriented IT results: Efficient monitoring and management can improve network optimization and ensure consistent network performance by enabling capacity planning, reducing mean time to recovery (MTTR), enabling RCA, and automating troubleshooting. Truly comprehensive observability can tie all of these results back to business objectives and provide meaningful insight directly to all stakeholders, not just technical staff.

Business Imperative
Modern network observability tools are indispensable for all businesses, regardless of whether these organizations own and manage their own networks. Even cloud-native startups can benefit from network observability tools because the domain-specific features can offer insights that other cloud-native tools cannot.

Sector Adoption Score
To help executives and decision-makers assess the potential impact and value of a network observability solution deployment to the business, this GigaOm Key Criteria report provides a structured assessment of the sector across five factors: benefit, maturity, urgency, impact, and effort. By scoring each factor based on how strongly it compels or deters adoption of a network observability solution, we provide an overall Sector Adoption Score (Figure 1) of 4.2 out of 5, with 5 indicating the strongest possible recommendation to adopt. This indicates that a network observability solution is a credible candidate for deployment and worthy of thoughtful consideration.

The factors contributing to the Sector Adoption Score for network observability are explained in more detail in the Sector Brief section that follows.