Buyer’s guide: How to shop for network observability tools

In the past, standardized and static networks enabled IT managers to more easily monitor the health and performance of infrastructure, applications, and services. Now the path an application takes to complete a request for an end user traverses from back-end systems to the cloud to service provider networks and end-user devices – which include a range of laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Also adding to the complexity is the reality of hybrid work most businesses must now support, putting pressure on IT teams to deliver the same level of performance and security to in-office, remote, and mobile employees. Network observability tools collect, analyze, and visualize data from multiple components to help IT organizations maintain reliability, security, and efficiency across their enterprise environment that spans beyond the physical network perimeter.

There are several factors in today’s digital environments driving the need for network observability tools. To start, enterprise networks are extremely complex, powering sophisticated applications that are supported across distributed systems. IT teams must manage on-premises components as well as external cloud-based environments and service provider networks as part of their overall network. By monitoring traffic patterns, latency, packet loss, bandwidth, and other metrics across many devices, IT teams can get views into performance, identify indicators of potential security incidents, and spot deviations from expected performance to more quickly resolve problems before they impact end users and customers.

Observability tools are also being called upon to help collaborative IT and security teams more quickly identify when a security attack is the cause of network events, for instance. By bringing data from multiple sources together for analysis, observability tools can help IT teams understand if network events belie a security threat. Most enterprises have a proliferation of monitoring tools, all generating alerts in their own manner, but observability tools promise to normalize the data and dissect what it means for IT managers.

“Part of the problem is that when data is scattered across multiple tools, the experience and context is lost. Network observability tools should stitch a lot together. Yes, you could see the same data cross five different tools, but how observable is it if John must mentally piece it together?” said Carlos Casanova, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “Sometimes network metrics will reveal a bad actor on the network that the security team would recognize but would not necessarily be picked up by network teams.”

In the same vein, network observability tools also promise to reduce the noise created from many systems throwing off alerts and events – bubbling up the information that is most important and relevant to network managers. Simply put, there are just too many systems and components generating data for human operators to gather and examine. Network observability tools reduce the work needed to collect and analyze volumes of data, and they also explain how the data will impact services when correlated with other events or incidents occurring across the network.

Network observability tools also thrive on data. The data collected makes the technology more intelligent about the environment it is monitoring and enables IT teams to make data-driven decisions on their networks. Not only can network observability tools drive better decisions for real-time monitoring, but they can also highlight areas for improvement to help network managers deliver higher-quality services and better performing applications.