Gartner defines the application security testing (AST) market as consisting of providers of products that enable organizations to assess applications for the presence and management of risk. These products identify risk by evaluating source code, performing runtime tests and inspecting supply chain components. AST products can be integrated throughout development workflows for continuous assessment or be used to perform ad hoc evaluations. They enable organizations to manage application risks by providing an integrated set of capabilities for risk identification, prioritization and triage, policy evaluation and enforcement, and remediation assistance. Market offerings are available in on-premises, SaaS and hybrid delivery models. Organizations leverage AST products to assess applications for the presence of security vulnerabilities and other risks (e.g., legal and operational) throughout their life cycle. These assessments are used to measure and manage the risks within individual applications, application components or groups of applications in the context of their business criticality and other key attributes (e.g., environment, sensitive data handling, etc.). AST products further enable organizations to evaluate software for compliance with internal policies as well as regulatory requirements established by governments or authoritative industry groups.
Gartner defines cloud financial management (CFM) tools as tooling that provides the ability to collect, organize, display, optimize and manage the investments in cloud computing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). They leverage algorithms, statistical models and/or AI/machine learning (ML) in support of cost reports, dashboards and/or other mechanisms/interfaces that provide capabilities to monitor cost, utilization and value indicators. This allows users to identify trends, anomalies and misaligned expectations, as well as opportunities to increase the efficiency of cloud configurations, architecture and contracts. CFM tools enable enterprises to collect and analyze public cloud cost and usage information and apply controls to define budget and cost policies to optimize spending on a continuous basis.
Cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs) are a unified and tightly integrated set of security and compliance capabilities, designed to protect cloud-native infrastructure and applications. CNAPPs incorporate an integrated set of proactive and reactive security capabilities, including artifact scanning, security guardrails, configuration and compliance management, risk detection and prioritization, and behavioral analytics, providing visibility, governance and control from code creation to production runtime. CNAPP solutions use a combination of API integrations with leading cloud platform providers, continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline integrations, and agent and agentless workload integration to offer combined development and runtime security coverage.
Gartner defines digital experience monitoring (DEM) as the measurement of the availability, performance and quality of the user experience of applications. This can include internal users (employees), external users (customers and partners) or a digital agent connecting to an API. In addition to performance, DEM enables observability of user behavior and journeys based on their interaction with applications. DEM tools allow I&O leaders to understand the availability, performance and reliability of business applications, networks and infrastructure by focusing on understanding the user experience. This is in contrast to other performance monitoring approaches, such as observability platforms, that understand the inner workings of applications.
Infrastructure monitoring tools capture the health and resource utilization of IT infrastructure components wherever they reside (e.g., in a data center, at the edge, or IaaS or PaaS in the cloud). This enables I&O teams to monitor the availability and resource utilization data of physical, virtual, software entities, and AI systems — including servers, containers, network devices, database instances, hypervisors, storage, and basic application monitoring. These tools collect data in near real time and perform historical data analysis or trending of the elements they monitor.
Gartner defines observability platforms as products that help organizations understand and optimize the health, performance and behavior of applications, services, infrastructure and AI agents, as well as user experience. They ingest and analyze telemetry such as logs, metrics, events and traces to detect issues that affect end users, enabling early remediation. These platforms are used by IT operations, SRE, platform engineering, developers, security teams and product owners. Modern businesses rely on critical digital applications and services that directly influence revenue, client satisfaction and brand reputation. Outages, latency and degraded performance harm these outcomes. Observability platforms address this by ingesting, correlating and analyzing telemetry from applications, infrastructure and AI systems to detect anomalies, identify the root cause of issues and quantify user‑experience impact. These capabilities enable organizations to improve the availability, performance and resilience of digital services. As a result, observability platforms support revenue‑loss avoidance through early detection, faster mean time to resolution and prevention of customer‑impacting failures. They also accelerate development and platform engineering workflows by providing continuous feedback on code changes, deployments and model behavior. This allows teams to deliver new features and AI capabilities faster while maintaining reliability and improving customer experience.
Security information and event management (SIEM) is a configurable system of record that collects, aggregates and analyzes security event data from on-premises and cloud environments. SIEM processes security event data for the purposes of threat detection, investigation and response. It natively supports data normalization and offers user-configurable detection content and reporting to orchestrate threat mitigation and satisfy compliance requirements. These solutions are delivered via a SaaS platform or client-hosted on-premises or private cloud. The security information and event management (SIEM) system must assist with: 1. Aggregating and normalizing data from various IT and operational technology (OT) environments. 2. Designing and executing near real-time monitoring and alerting content. 3. Enriching and investigating security events of interest. 4. Supporting manual and automated response actions. 5. Maintaining and reporting on current and historical event data.
The site reliability engineering (SRE) tooling market enables and supports the adoption of SRE practices, and focuses on improving reliability, resilience and the customer experience of products and platforms. These tools help organizations move faster while managing operational risks by setting and managing reliability goals, and surfacing monitoring and observability insights and performance demands. The tools are delivered as stand-alone tools, or as part of platforms with broader capabilities. SRE tools are essential for ensuring the reliability, performance and overall health of software systems. They provide valuable insights and automation capabilities that help teams manage complex systems effectively.
Gartner defines telemetry pipelines as tools that provide a uniform and holistic mechanism to manage the collection, ingestion, transformation and routing of IT operational telemetry from source to destination. They can be used to filter and manage the amount of telemetry ingested by aggregation and analysis solutions, but have uses beyond cost management, such as data normalization and enrichment. As the number of telemetry sources increase and are distributed geographically, telemetry pipelines are becoming the core of an organization’s telemetry life cycle management strategy.