GigaOm Radar for Network Observabilityv3.0

1. Summary

Network observability is a category of solutions that go beyond device-centric network monitoring to provide truly relevant, end-to-end visibility and intelligence for all the traffic in your network, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or anywhere else. Representing a step beyond network performance monitoring, network observability guarantees visibility and distinguishes itself with actionable insights. These insights shift many low-level activities—such as troubleshooting or traffic analysis—from engineers to the network observability tool.

Observability solutions are less about specialization and more about consolidating a comprehensive experience in a single tool. This convergence 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 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, described in depth in the GigaOm report, “Key Criteria Report for Evaluating Network Observability Solutions.”