Gartner defines observability platforms as products used to understand the health, performance and behavior of applications, services and infrastructure. They do this by ingesting telemetry (operational data) from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, logs, metrics, events and traces. Observability platforms enable analysis of the ingested telemetry, either via human operator or machine intelligence, to determine changes in system behavior that impact end-user experience, such as outages or performance degradation. This allows early, and even preemptive, problem remediation. Observability platforms are used by IT operations, site reliability engineers, cloud and platform teams, application developers and product owners.
Modern businesses rely heavily on critical digital applications and services, which are revenue-generating, client-facing and important to the efficient operation of the business. Outages, performance degradation and unreliability directly impact top-line revenue, client sentiment and brand perception.
Observability platforms are used by organizations to understand and improve the availability, performance and resilience of these critical applications and services. Investment in and successful deployment of observability platforms leads to revenue loss avoidance and enables faster product development cycles and improvements in brand perception.
Dynatrace is a software that provides observability, monitoring, and analytics capabilities for applications, cloud infrastructure, and user experiences. It automates the collection and analysis of performance data across distributed environments, offering features such as real-time application tracing, infrastructure monitoring, digital experience management, and problem detection using artificial intelligence. The software assists organizations in identifying and resolving performance issues, optimizing resource utilization, and ensuring reliability of digital services. Its analytics engine processes large volumes of data to deliver insights that support operational efficiency and service availability for complex technology landscapes including cloud-native and hybrid environments.
New Relic is a software that provides observability and monitoring for applications, infrastructure, and digital experiences. The software offers features including real-time performance tracking, error analytics, distributed tracing, and alerting. It enables organizations to monitor and analyze metrics, logs, and traces from distributed systems to facilitate troubleshooting and optimize performance. New Relic supports integration with various technologies and cloud services, allowing teams to gain visibility into the health and behavior of their software environments. The software addresses the business problem of maintaining uptime, improving application reliability, and proactively identifying bottlenecks or failures across complex technology stacks.
AppDynamics is a software that provides application performance monitoring by tracking and analyzing metrics across distributed environments. It enables organizations to observe business transactions, identify performance bottlenecks, and monitor application health in real time. The software delivers insights into infrastructure components, user experiences, and code-level diagnostics to help maintain availability and performance. AppDynamics supports integration with various platforms and technologies, offering visibility across cloud and hybrid environments. It facilitates root cause analysis and alerting, assisting enterprises in resolving issues that impact critical business processes. The software aims to streamline IT operations by automating anomaly detection and providing analytical dashboards for informed decision making.
Datadog is a software that offers monitoring and analytics capabilities for cloud-scale applications. The software collects metrics, traces, logs, and events from various sources and provides dashboards, alerts, and visualization tools to help users track the performance and health of systems and services. Datadog integrates with cloud infrastructure, containers, databases, and applications, enabling users to correlate data across their technology stack. The software addresses challenges related to dynamic, distributed environments by providing observability and insights that support incident detection, troubleshooting, and optimization of resources and applications. It is designed to facilitate collaboration between development, operations, and security teams in managing application reliability and system performance.
Amazon CloudWatch is a software designed for monitoring and managing cloud resources and applications within Amazon Web Services environments. The software collects and tracks metrics, logs, and events, providing visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. Amazon CloudWatch enables automated responses to changes in infrastructure and supports alerting and dashboard creation for real-time monitoring. The software assists businesses by helping identify operational issues, analyze trends, set alarms for specific thresholds, and automate resource scaling based on performance metrics, thereby supporting efficient infrastructure management and incident response in cloud deployments.
ManageEngine Applications Manager is a software designed for monitoring the performance and availability of applications, servers, databases, and other IT resources. The software provides detailed insights into application health, response times, and transaction flow, helping organizations identify and resolve performance bottlenecks. It supports monitoring for various technologies including web servers, application servers, databases, cloud resources, and virtualization platforms. The software features alerting capabilities, root cause analysis, and reporting tools to aid IT teams in ensuring the continuous operation of critical business applications. By enabling proactive detection and remediation of issues, the software addresses the need for maintaining optimal application performance in complex IT environments.
Azure Monitor is a software designed to provide comprehensive monitoring and observability for applications and infrastructure deployed on Azure and in hybrid environments. The software collects and analyzes data from various sources such as virtual machines, containers, applications, and networks to deliver insights into performance, availability, and operational health. It offers features including metrics collection, log analytics, alerting, and visual dashboards to assist businesses in identifying and resolving issues, optimizing resource usage, and maintaining system reliability. Azure Monitor addresses the business need to proactively detect anomalies, troubleshoot errors, and ensure the effective management of cloud resources and services within a unified platform.
IBM Instana Observability automatically discovers, maps, and monitors all services and infrastructure components, providing complete visibility across your application stack. It continuously captures every trace, detects changes in real-time and provides detailed insights to automate root cause detection and resolution.
Elastic Observability is a software designed to enable organizations to monitor and analyze distributed infrastructure and applications by integrating data from logs, metrics, traces, and uptime information. The software aggregates and visualizes operational data in real time, enabling detection of performance bottlenecks and failures across cloud-based, hybrid, and on-premises environments. It assists teams in troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and maintaining system reliability by offering search, filtering, and alerting features. Elastic Observability addresses the business problem of fragmented monitoring by providing a unified platform to streamline incident response and improve visibility into application and system performance.
Grafana Cloud is a fully managed, open and composable cloud-hosted platform that enables teams to accomplish their observability goals faster and easier. Powered by Grafana Labs' open source projects – Grafana for visualization, Loki for logs, Mimir for metrics, and Tempo for traces – it supports 100+ data sources and 50+ curated infrastructure monitoring integrations to help organizations unify disparate data in Grafana dashboards. With the ability to natively correlate between metrics, logs, and traces, users can speed up root cause analysis and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). The platform is highly available, fast, and cost-efficient, supporting multi-tenancy at massive scale. It also offers turnkey solutions for incident response and management (IRM), load testing, Kubernetes monitoring, application observability, frontend observability, continuous profiling, and more, making it a comprehensive observability stack.
Splunk Observability Cloud is a software designed to monitor, analyze, and manage the performance and reliability of applications, infrastructure, and digital systems across cloud and hybrid environments. The software provides real-time visibility into metrics, traces, and logs, enabling teams to detect, investigate, and resolve incidents faster. It offers features such as automated anomaly detection, distributed tracing, customizable dashboards, and integrations with various cloud services. The software helps organizations address operational challenges by facilitating rapid identification of bottlenecks and failures, supporting efficient incident response, and improving system uptime and user experience.
LM Envision is a software designed for unified monitoring and observability across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. It provides features such as automated infrastructure discovery, real-time performance analytics, and alerting for networks, servers, cloud resources, and applications. LM Envision aggregates data from various sources to help IT teams identify, diagnose, and resolve operational issues, aiming to enhance system reliability and streamline troubleshooting processes. The software supports integration with third-party tools and offers visual dashboards that aid in tracking metrics and trends, helping organizations maintain consistent performance and manage complex digital infrastructure.
The Grafana Enterprise Stack is a self-managed observability stack tailored for enterprises, with scalability, security, Grafana Labs support, and features that provide better collaboration, operations, and governance in a self-managed environment. The Grafana Enterprise Stack is comprised of:
Grafana Enterprise, an enhanced version of Grafana that includes enterprise features, support, and plugins for data sources for other commercial tools such as Splunk, New Relic, MongoDB, ServiceNow, Oracle, and Snowflake.
Grafana Enterprise Metrics, an infinitely scalable Prometheus-compatible metrics system designed for large organizations that is simple to use and maintain.
Grafana Enterprise Logs, a self-managed logging solution that runs securely at scale, with a unique approach to log indexing, storage, and administration control.
Grafana Enterprise Traces, a scalable, secure, self-managed tracing service.
ManageEngine Site24x7 is a software that provides monitoring and management solutions for websites, servers, networks, cloud resources, and applications. The software enables organizations to monitor the availability and performance of digital assets in real time, offering capabilities such as uptime monitoring, application performance monitoring, network monitoring, server monitoring, and cloud infrastructure monitoring. Site24x7 supports multi-location website monitoring, synthetic transaction monitoring, log analysis, and real user monitoring. The software aims to help businesses identify, diagnose, and resolve performance bottlenecks across diverse IT environments, supporting various deployment models and providing automated alerting and reporting features to enhance service reliability and operational efficiency.
Coralogix is a software that focuses on centralized log management and analytics for organizations needing to manage large volumes of log data across their cloud environments. The software enables users to ingest, parse, and analyze logs, metrics, and traces in real time, converting raw data into actionable insights. Coralogix automates the detection of anomalies, monitors application performance, and streamlines compliance reporting. The software provides features such as alerting, visualization, and querying through dashboards, supporting observability and troubleshooting efforts for DevOps, security, and engineering teams. Coralogix helps address challenges related to operational visibility, incident response, and system health monitoring within distributed infrastructure and applications.
SolarWinds Observability is a SaaS offering built to extend visibility across the cloud-native, on-prem, and hybrid technology stack, enabling DevOps, IT ops, and Cloud Ops teams to spend more time developing new, modern applications and infrastructures, fuel innovation while continuing to meet SLAs and exceed customer expectations in legacy on-prem and hybrid IT via a single, unified offering.
Chronosphere Platform is a software solution designed for monitoring and observability of cloud-native environments. The software enables organizations to collect, store, and analyze metrics from distributed systems and applications. Chronosphere Platform provides features such as scalable data ingestion, real-time querying, visualization capabilities, and alert management. The software assists in identifying performance bottlenecks, tracking system health, and optimizing resource usage within cloud infrastructure. By integrating with various cloud platforms and developer tools, the software supports teams in managing large volumes of telemetry data and improving incident response. The solution addresses challenges in operating and maintaining reliable cloud-native systems by facilitating efficient monitoring and troubleshooting workflows.
Dynatrace AppMon is a software designed to monitor and manage application performance across distributed environments. It provides real-time insights into transaction flows, response times, and infrastructure dependencies, enabling identification and resolution of performance bottlenecks and errors. The software supports end-to-end visibility for web, mobile, and server-based applications, and collects data from network, server, database, and user interaction layers. Dynatrace AppMon assists organizations in ensuring reliability, optimizing resource usage, and supporting troubleshooting efforts by automating collection and analysis of key performance metrics. This legacy software is used in application lifecycle management, testing, and operational monitoring to address issues such as slowdowns, failures, and inefficient resource allocation.
Sumo Logic Application Performance Monitoring (APM) provides an Otel-native, distributed tracing capability to monitor end users on mobile apps and browsers, the applications and databases they use and the infrastructure that supports it. Advanced analytics correlates logs, metrics and distributed traces to generate a unified entity model. Sumo Logic enables teams to manage reliability, understand and monitor critical applications resulting in improved efficiency, reduced latency and reduced errors.
BMC Helix Observability & AIOps is a software designed to provide monitoring, analysis, and management of IT infrastructure and applications. The software offers features such as real-time observability, anomaly detection, root cause analysis, and predictive insights using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. It collects and correlates data from various sources within hybrid and multi-cloud environments to deliver a comprehensive view of system performance and availability. The software aims to help organizations reduce downtime, identify and resolve issues more quickly, and optimize resource utilization by automating incident response and providing actionable insights into IT operations.
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Features of Observability Platforms
Updated July 2025
Mandatory Features:
Collect telemetry from public cloud providers (for example, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure).
Enrich telemetry by providing contextualization, such as topological dependency or service mapping.
Support interactive exploration and analysis of multiple telemetry types (including traces, metrics and logs) to generate insights about user and application behavior.
Support the modeling or mapping of relationships between monitored services and their role in business transactions.
Ingest, store and analyze operational telemetry feeds, including (but not limited to) metrics, event, log and trace data.
Identify and analyze changes in application, service and infrastructure behavior to determine the causes of outages, performance degradation and quantify their impact on end-user experience.
Peer Lessons Learned for Observability Platforms
Published February 2025
These lessons focuses on the responses to the questions: “If you could start over, what would your organization do differently?” and “What one piece of advice would you give other prospective customers?”