Gartner defines observability platforms as products that ingest telemetry (operational data) from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, logs, metrics, events and traces. They are used to understand the health, performance and behavior of applications, services and infrastructure. Observability platforms enable an analysis of the 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 for early, and even preemptive, problem remediation. Observability solutions are used by IT operations, site reliability engineers, cloud and platform teams, application developers, and product owners.
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.

Observability Platforms

Infrastructure monitoring tools capture the health and resource utilization of IT infrastructure components, no matter where they reside (e.g., in a data center, at the edge, infrastructure as a service [IaaS] or platform as a service [PaaS] in the cloud). This enables I&O leaders to monitor and collate the availability and resource utilization data of physical and virtual entities — including servers, containers, network devices, database instances, hypervisors and storage. These tools collect data in real time and perform historical data analysis or trending of the elements they monitor.

Infrastructure Monitoring Tools

Network automation platforms are products that automate and orchestrate multiple vendors’ network functionality. These platforms support a broad range of capabilities including provisioning, deprovisioning, orchestration, troubleshooting, operations, workflow, configuration management, event-driven automation, validation and reporting. These platforms are well-suited to add value on top of existing point network automation tools by orchestrating end-to-end network workflows across existing automation tools. Network automation platforms interact directly with network devices, other automation and orchestration tools, network management systems/controllers, and/or network services. These platforms increase agility and efficiency of network infrastructure while lowering costs, reducing the amount of manual human errors, and improving compliance with required rules, regulations and laws.

Network Automation Platforms

Gartner defines digital experience monitoring (DEM) tools as those that measure the availability, performance and quality of the user experience (human user or digital agent) of critical applications. This can include internal users (employees and contractors), external users (customers and partners) or a digital agent connecting to an API. In addition to performance, DEM technologies enable observability of user behavior and journey based on their interaction with applications.

Digital Experience Monitoring

The DDI market is composed of solutions that provide and/or manage internal DNS and DHCP services, along with IP address management (IPAM). DNS, or Domain Name System, is a hierarchical and decentralized naming system that translates human-readable domain names into machine-readable IP addresses. DHCP, or Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, is a network management protocol that automatically assigns IP addresses and other network configuration parameters to devices on a network. IP Address Management (IPAM) is a method used to plan, track, and manage IP address spaces in a network. DDI solution helps improve the availability of critical IT infrastructure while reducing operational expenditures. Infrastructure and operations (I&O) personnel utilize DDI to improve management and integration between these critical services and to provide a structured, automated and secure workflow for basic network operations (for example, adding printers or servers, allocating IP ranges for new branches, and so on). 

DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management (DDI)

SolarWinds Observability Reviews, Ratings & Features 2025 | Gartner Peer Insights

Evaluation and contract negotiation

Evaluation & Contracting

Ability to understand your organization's needs

Timely and complete response to product questions

Pricing and contract flexibility (pricing and terms)

Integration and deployment

Integration & Deployment

Availability of quality 3rd-party resources (integrators, service providers, etc.)

Ease of integration using standard APIs and tools

Quality and availability of end-user training

Ease of deployment

Service and support

Service & Support

Timeliness of vendor's response

Quality of technical support

Quality of peer user community

Product capabilities

Product Capabilities

Interactive exploration of telemetry

Generate actionable insights through analytics/AI/ML

Vulnerability & Threat Detection

Business analysis    

Service monitoring

Anomaly detection

Distributed profiling

Application debugging

Workload planning

Interoperability

Additional Context

Dynatrace

New Relic

AppDynamics

Cisco Systems (Splunk)

Datadog

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

ManageEngine Applications Manager

ManageEngine

Azure Monitor

Microsoft

IBM Instana Observability

Elastic Observability

Elastic

Splunk Observability Cloud

<50M USD

50M - 250M USD

250M - 500M USD

500M - 1B USD

3B - 10B USD

1B - 3B USD

30B + USD

10B - 30B USD

Gov't/PS/ED <5,000 Employees

Gov't/PS/ED 5,000 - 50,000 Employees

SolarWinds Observability

SolarWinds

Project Manager

Poor support quality, no timeline for feature requests / hotfixes available

VP, IT

Solarwinds has demonstrated a unique commitment to feedback. As one of their pilot customers of the Observability platform, we had an opportunity to provide a lot of feedback during the implementation and rollout, both positive and negative.  Despite the fact that we're a relatively small company, Solarwinds assigned resources to our account and made sure our input was heard, acknowledged and addressed... and in many cases, by improving the product.

Other...

Broadcom (VMware)

Cisco Systems

Fortinet

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

ServiceNow

Zscaler

Riverbed

Palo Alto Networks

LogicMonitor

Grafana Labs

Oracle

Cisco (AppDynamics)

Kaseya

Tanium

Broadcom

Nagios

Splunk (SignalFx)

Absolute

Head Of Security

Simple but effective tool.  We ship logs, they ingest the logs and are made searchable.  I like that it's not trying to overengineer the problem.

Senior Engineering Manager

Loggly works great, is easy to use, and is cheaper than alternatives which have many more bells and whistles.
For example, SumoLogic is a better product with more features, but it's much much more expensive. Loggly is great if you want a good tool, on a budget.

INFRASTRUCTURE DEPARTMENT MANAGER

I have been using the product for 15 years. The vendor is very responsive to end-user needs. They actively solicit customer feedback and make product changes based on it.

Senior Infrastructure Architect (Network)

Overall, Solarwinds has a great value to cost ratio. We evaluation a number of products when selecting and have been happy with the experience we have had. 

IT Associate

We have had an overall great experience with the product as a whole and the support received when asked for it.

LAN WIFI TEAM LEAD

I have on perm Solarwinds and we use this to monitor Aruba switches and APs. Routers and Firewalls as well. Firewalls and routers work well. The issue I am having is with the reporting from the Aruba switches. The data I can get with Solarwinds is limited compared to other vendors.

Active

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50M-1B USD

1B-10B USD

10B+ USD

Gov't/PS/Ed

Network Engineer

Flexible and very customizable monitoring software. Buggy, but well documented. I love classic Dashboards. Sometimes error codes make no sense.

Sr Sys Analyst Engineer

Vendor is very knowledgeable about the product.  The host very informative training classes also.

SR. SYSTEM ENGINEER

Whenever we open ticket or need additional support we get it within a timely matter. Provides a stable and customizable platform for monitoring and tracking our enviroment. 

Network Director

Solarwinds was very easy to work with throughout the selection and implementation processes

SENIOR MANAGER NETWORK ENGINEERING

Solarwinds new HCO platform gives us enhanced flexibility but even more than that, it allows us to scale up or down our deployment as needed

MANAGER, PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Utilising Papertrail has allowed us to consolidate application logging for Ruby on Rails apps, and ensured that we can easily aggregate logs and track down problems.

Infrastructure and Security Director

SolarWinds has always been a reliable and trustworthy product for us.  It gives us visibility into all parts of our infrastructure, and allows our team to be proactive in resolving issues.

SENIOR SYSTEMS ENGINEER

We use Solarwinds as the primary platform for observability, its integrated into all aspects of IT and provides great value to us. 

Principal Systems Analyst

Ease of use and price are the primary factors. We have been able to migrate other NMS systems to Orion. This has saved our organization a lot of money.

Customer Service & Support Associate

I have been using SW for almost a year as a user and new admin and I find it very beneficial for my job

SR System Admin

Fantastic product but also has room for improvement. I believe the use of thwack where customers can suggest features is useful.

Observability dashboard

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.

SolarWinds (NYSE:SWI) provides simple, powerful, secure observability and IT management software built to enable customers to accelerate their digital transformation. Our solutions provide organizations worldwide—regardless of type, size, or complexity—with a comprehensive and unified view of today’s modern, distributed, and hybrid environments. We continuously engage with IT service and operations professionals, DevOps and SecOps professionals, and database administrators (DBAs) to understand the challenges they face in maintaining high-performing and highly available hybrid IT infrastructures, applications, and environments. The insights we gain from them, in places like our THWACK community, help us to address customers’ needs in solutions for observability, IT service management, application performance, and database management now and in the future.

The primary focus of the company lies in simplifying IT processes. It effectively tackles major business challenges by providing solutions that streamline complex technical operations. By integrating advanced IT solutions into everyday business activities, the company helps businesses increase efficiency and productivity. Through its innovative technological solutions, the company solves pertinent business problems in the realm of IT.