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.
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.