Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and Deployment Types
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analysts’ Take
- Methodology
- About Ron Williams
- About Sue Clarke
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Monitoring and observability are crucial IT functions that help organizations keep systems up and running and performance levels high. Knowing that a problem is likely to occur means that it can be rectified before it impacts systems. Monitoring can tell you about performance and identify “break/fix” conditions of failure and remedy. Observability seeks to determine why devices, systems, or applications are behaving a certain way within the context of IT. Observability also has a role to play in monitoring end user experiences—knowing there is an issue may explain why customer journeys are being terminated at a particular point.
Operational awareness brings together all the various information streams within an organization, including IT data, to determine how systems are performing, what is likely to break next, and how to prevent problems before they have a chance to impact performance or availability.
Maintaining operational awareness is difficult enough in a single-cloud environment. When multiple cloud vendors are involved, it becomes exponentially more complicated. Most organizations’ cloud deployments are not limited to a single public cloud but include private clouds hosted on-site and hybrids of public and private clouds as well. Unlike on-premises infrastructure, cloud deployments can change quickly based on application needs, finances, and performance. Therefore, maintaining operational awareness has never been more important or more complex. This is where cloud observability comes in.
Cloud observability centers around having deep visibility into the systems, applications, and services in your distributed cloud environment. Cloud observability solutions provide performance monitoring, reporting, predictive analytics, and cost analysis; all of these are capabilities that contribute to IT and operational awareness.
This GigaOm Radar report highlights key cloud observability vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Observability Solutions,” we describe in more detail the key features and metrics that are used to evaluate vendors in this market.
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding, consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.