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 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.