Report:

Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability

Top Vendor Products for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability in 2023

• Datadog
• Dynatrace
• Honeycomb
• New Relic
• Splunk

Application Performance Monitoring and Observability Vendor Product Comparisons 2023

• Amazon Web Services - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Analytics and ML-based insights: The general-purpose data analytics services available on AWS are an important differentiator, and are one reason many customers select AWS for their workloads. Many of the enhancements being added to the AWS observability platform, such as Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor, AWS X-Ray Insights, Amazon CloudWatch Logs data protection and Amazon CloudWatch anomaly detection, are similarly based on delivering high-quality insights from scalable analytics practices and ML models.
  • Support for modern architectures: Many of today's monitoring and observability challenges are due to the multilayered and distributed complexity of cloud-native workloads. The AWS observability services are evolving in lock step with its cloud platform, along with feedback from customers. Early adopters of new AWS platform services will benefit from out-of-the-box compatibility with AWS observability tools.
  • Geographic footprint and distribution: AWS has broadened their service delivery portfolio beyond regions and availability zones to include Outposts, Local Zones, Wavelength and even space. Although telemetry may be distributed as widely as the workloads, recent advances, such as cross-account observability, support centralizing the generation of insights and events.

  Cons:

  • Offering complexity: Depending on how they are counted, there may be between eight and 28 monitoring and observability services available from AWS. Although this represents an impressive diversity of product, it also remains a source of confusion for customers. The often creative naming of services does little to disambiguate them.
  • Product strategy: AWS is known for tireless customer centricity, which is certainly a net positive for its customers. What makes this a caution are potential blind spots in their APM and observability products that may result from being less aware of the innovations being delivered by their competitors.
  • Cost management: Estimating the actual costs associated with the ongoing use of AWS APM and observability tools is difficult, particularly in competitive analysis situations. Each service maintains its own, geography-specific pricing levers and underlying cost elements, such as data transfer costs, that must also be accounted for.


• Broadcom - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Broad enterprise offering: Broadcom's portfolio of products includes mainframe software, security, and automation. Broadcom can expand its APM footprint in its existing customer base via these capabilities, combined with favorable pricing and bundling.
  • Integrated AIOps: Broadcom's DX APM and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) solution offers functionality across user experience, applications, infrastructure, network and mainframe monitoring.
  • Global presence: Broadcom has operations in multiple geographies and sells both directly to clients, as well as through partners.

  Cons:

  • Pricing: Broadcom offers portfolio license agreements (PLAs), which are large enterprise contracts for its full suites such as AIOps, as well as individual pricing for products such as DX APM. Although PLAs can simplify pricing for existing customers, others have expressed frustrations, with some clients describing new pricing as "punitive." Portfolio pricing can also make price comparisons with other vendors difficult.
  • Lack of visibility in the market: Broadcom's strategic direct sales focus is primarily on large, existing customers. In Gartner inquiries, Broadcom solutions rarely make the shortlist for APM and observability solutions when the client is not an existing Broadcom customer.
  • No integrated UI: It was noted during the product demonstration the solution lacks a common interface, with many products still branded as CA (Computer Associates), despite five years passing since acquisition. Switching between the different interfaces during problem analysis increases cognitive load on the operator and creates inefficiencies increasing the time to problem resolution.


• Cisco - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Brand reputation and portfolio: Both Cisco and AppDynamics are well-known brands with meaningful mind share. AppDynamics has an extensive, diverse customer base that have relied on these products to monitor their infrastructure and critical workloads, including mainframe and SAP applications.
  • Network and security credibility: Cisco Secure Application is one of the first vulnerability management capabilities embedded in APM and observability products. Others have followed, and are ushering in what can be described as a convergence of operations and security monitoring. Cisco's integration of telemetry from their ThousandEyes acquisition into AppDynamics offers insight about the internet's role in application delivery that few other products can match.
  • Global reach: AppDynamics is available for customers to host themselves, and SaaS delivery platforms are currently available in North America, EMEA, India, Africa, the Middle East and South America. Cisco also has a mature partner ecosystem, and whether directly or via its channel partners, can deliver AppDynamics to customers nearly anywhere on earth.

  Cons:

  • Channel strategy: In 2021, Cisco moved 100% of AppDynamics sales and distribution to the channel. In inquiry calls with Gartner, some clients have expressed concern that their allocated partners lacked experience in sales and technical knowledge of AppDynamics. New and existing AppDynamics clients should carefully evaluate new partners, requiring references of previous AppDynamics implementations.
  • Portfolio complexity: AppDynamics and CNAO are separate and distinct products with different capabilities and similar application monitoring use cases. Although Cisco has stated plans for coexistence, organizations seeking to monitor hybrid workloads should ensure that an end-to-end transaction view and business journey support will be possible when a combination of products would be required to monitor them.
  • Agent management: Managing AppDynamics agents remains a largely manual process. Although some form of fleet management is becoming common in competitive products, Cisco has announced, but had not yet shipped, automated agent management at the time this research was conducted.


• Datadog - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Market execution: Datadog continues to exhibit strong market execution, increasing their customer base and growing their trailing-12-month revenue at 50% year over year to March 2023. Datadog's product-led growth (PLG) strategy resonates with clients looking to adopt modern observability solutions. Datadog's clients are among the most diverse that Gartner encounters. Clients range from small businesses with limited experience in deploying monitoring, to large global enterprises with mature operations practices.
  • Product portfolio: Datadog has a broad portfolio of solutions for monitoring, with an integrated look and feel and common UI across components. This common user experience increases operator efficiency, reducing the need to context switch between different products. The Datadog platform also offers solutions in key areas of IT operations and security functions, with recent additions including Observability Pipelines (telemetry pipelines), Cloud Cost Management, Cloud SIEM, Application Security Management, Application Vulnerability Management and Workflow Automation.
  • Cloud-native monitoring: While Datadog is used to monitor premises-based and hybrid-cloud environments, many clients undergoing digital transformation focus on the cloud-native aspects of Datadog for monitoring modern architectures, such as containers, Kubernetes and serverless environments. Datadog also has strong integrations with CSPs, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, extending the functionality of the native toolsets.

  Cons:

  • Pricing: While Datadog pricing is transparent, some Gartner clients have raised concerns regarding spend spiraling quickly out of control as usage grows. To address this, Datadog has begun offering configurable ingestion controls to help customers manage cost.
  • Business model: Datadog's portfolio has grown significantly in recent years, and they now have 20 separate product lines on their website. Each module has its own pricing structure, which can make pricing proposals confusing to understand and negotiate.
  • Transparency: In early March 2023, Datadog experienced a significant service outage lasting more than 24 hours, impacting all customers across all regions. Outages can happen to anyone, but concerns have been raised regarding the timeliness and transparency of communication relating to the incident, with a postmortem only being made publicly available in mid-May 2023.


• Dynatrace - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • New, centralized data platform: Grail is Dynatrace's new data lakehouse technology, designed to optimize the storage and analysis of logs, metrics and traces. This allows customers to more efficiently gain insights about workload health and performance. Grail is a recent addition to the Dynatrace portfolio, and clients are still in the early stages of implementation. Grail is generally available for SaaS customers.
  • Analytics: Dynatrace's AI engine, Davis, is designed to analyze dependencies based on the topology discovered by Dynatrace Smartscape. Dynatrace has enhanced Davis with on-demand exploratory analytics that enable IT teams to identify trends and predict performance issues that might impact customer experience.
  • High availability: Dynatrace is designed for high availability (HA). It provides automatic scaling and load balancing to meet unexpected spikes in demand and traffic. All the components are load balanced and in active-active deployments. Long-term data storage is performed by data storage instances that provide HA via data redundancy.

  Cons:

  • Pricing model change: Dynatrace has recently introduced an hourly pricing model, called the Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS). This differs substantially from their unit-based pricing model. Existing clients, including procurement teams, will need to understand the impact that this will have on contract renewals, and new clients will need to carefully assess their level of committed annual spend.
  • Rapid evolution: Dynatrace has recently announced and partially delivered substantial changes to its core products. In addition to Grail, mentioned above, changes include a revamped user interface, new extensibility capabilities and augmented security monitoring. Existing customers may require some additional training to understand and make use of these additional features.
  • Suitability for SMBs: Dynatrace's offering is most frequently found in larger enterprises, and this is reflected in their sales strategy. Medium and smaller enterprises may find that Dynatrace pricing and technology are not a good fit for less complex environments.


• Elastic - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Fleet management: Elastic introduced Fleet, a management product that can work independently or with other automation tools to automate deployment/configuration management of multiple agents concurrently. Fleet also provides full central management for Elastic Agents. Configuration, policy, version updates, and integrations can be deployed centrally at runtime with Fleet.
  • Open and flexible: Elastic data platform ingests high-cardinality telemetry at scale to provide context. It can transform, analyze, visualize and gain insights from increasingly complex, heterogeneous datasets while owning data. Elastic's open architecture also enables customers to adapt the solution's observability capabilities to provide deeper business insights.
  • Deployment models: Elastic offers on-premises and cloud-based versions of its observability products, with broad feature parity between the two. Elastic Cloud is available on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in more than 50 hyperscaler cloud regions.

  Cons:

  • Pricing estimate: In contrast to other vendors in this market, Elastic bases its pricing model on compute resources. Although Elastic offers a pricing calculator, comparison during procurement or review, and during forecasting of costs and budgets, can be challenging.
  • Adoption: Elastic is based on open-source software that has a reputation for a steep learning curve. The SaaS-based Elastic Cloud simplifies adoption, but organizations planning to self-host Elastic should ensure that sufficient skills are available.
  • Visualizations: There are three different visualization options in the product — Kibana Lens, Canvas and Kibana. Determining which one to use for a given purpose can present some confusion to the user. Kibana offers the most power to visualization in Elastic, but requires the use of query language, which can be a challenge for inexperienced teams.


• Grafana Labs - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Visible ubiquity: Use of the Grafana visualization tool has exploded, as it represents a relatively simple and powerful way to visually integrate telemetry from multiple sources into a single pane. Grafana Labs has established delivery partnerships with most major cloud providers that enables use of its enterprise visualization product as part of the cloud bill. Grafana's prevalence and utility have fostered an ecosystem of data source plugins and dashboard templates that continues to grow.
  • Customer experience: Grafana Labs has built mature services, support and onboarding functions for a company of their size. In addition, community forums and other interaction opportunities are there for more informal requests and Q&A. The company also offers a variety of conferences, both in-person and virtual. This level of engagement is uncommon even with larger, more established vendors.
  • Support for cloud-native standards: Although Grafana Labs is not responsible for Prometheus, many Prometheus maintainers work for Grafana Labs. Grafana Mimir and its predecessor, Cortex, are generally considered more suitable for use at enterprise scale than upstream Prometheus. The company has similar involvement in the OpenTelemetry project, as well as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) at large. Organizations that desire support for and compatibility with open source may wish to consider Grafana Labs as part of their observability stack.

  Cons:

  • Limited analytics: Grafana is predominantly a data visualization and dashboarding tool and excels at that. The alerting capabilities are improving as well. Organizations looking for deeper, data analysis or AI/ML will not likely be satisfied with the out-of-the-box capabilities of Grafana Cloud. There are open interfaces and extensibility points in Grafana that may support pluggable analysis mechanisms.
  • Lots of "co-opetition": Grafana grew to prominence as an open, neutral, telemetry visualization tool that could be used by anybody for anything. This has encouraged a number of commercial monitoring vendors — many of whom are also included in this research — to create or support the creation of Grafana data source plugins. Now, with Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise, the company is competing with those vendors more directly, which may affect the support life cycle for these interfaces.
  • Use-case diversity: Open source Grafana has many non-IT use cases, and is commonly used to visualize anything that can be represented as time-series data. This includes electricity consumption, weather and temperature, and IoT. At the same time, Grafana Cloud and Grafana Enterprise are being positioned as observability solutions focused on IT use cases. Grafana Labs has not made clear what effect, if any, discrepancies between these use cases will have on product life cycle.


• Honeycomb - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Insight from telemetry: The BubbleUp capability remains at the center of Honeycomb analytics, and its role within the product has expanded. The recently introduced Service Map ensures that engineers and operators are centered on the right data, and enhanced CI/CD integration helps tie workload behavior back to deployment events.
  • Customer responsiveness: Honeycomb meets customers where they are by providing a variety of ways to provide feedback and get questions answered. Slack, live office hours, direct outreach and social media are available to ensure that users remain happy and productive.
  • Community building: Honeycomb has continued its outreach and to publicize the benefits of observability, as well as other site reliability engineering (SRE) practices. As OpenTelemetry has become front and center to this market, so has Honeycomb's in-product support for it and contributions to the project itself.

  Cons:

  • Single platform location: Honeycomb's service continues to be delivered solely from the AWS us-east-1 (Northern Virginia) region. Although this does not appear to have been a significant limitation to date, it may become so at any time, and has almost certainly steered some potential customers elsewhere.
  • Lack of integrated DEM: Honeycomb leaves the collection of digital experience monitoring telemetry entirely up to its customers. The front-end visibility roadmap item may increase support for real-user monitoring, but prospective customers that rely on synthetic transaction monitoring will still be required to manage it themselves with additional or alternative solutions.
  • Underutilization of partnerships: For a smaller organization, and certainly relative to many of their competitors, Honeycomb has chosen to continue to conduct business on a direct-to-customer basis, rather than leverage sales or delivery channel partners. This can limit its growth opportunities in some parts of the world.


• IBM - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • DevOps integration: IBM Instana's Pipeline Feedback integration provides developers an easy way to "shift left" observability to integrate with their CI/CD environment, providing early warning of issues with new releases and a way to roll back to limit performance degradation.
  • Coverage for mainframe and modern architectures: IBM has added capability to the Instana suite to allow for monitoring of mainframe zSystems, as well as a solution capable of handling modern containerized and hybrid environments. Clients looking for a solution which includes these systems should consider IBM Instana.
  • Pricing model: IBM Instana continues to offer an easy-to-understand pricing model, based on a per-host metric, and is competitively priced in the market. Pricing varies for the SaaS version, compared with the on-premises model, and list prices are available on the Instana website.

  Cons:

  • OpenTelemetry integration: IBM Instana emphasizes the use of its own proprietary tooling for distributed tracing. While Instana has recently added official support for OpenTelemetry tracing and metrics, it is not yet treated with parity. Clients that prioritize OpenTelemetry should carefully evaluate whether Instana meets their requirements.
  • Integration with IBM tools: More than two years since its acquisition, Instana still remains primarily a stand-alone tool, with limited integration with other parts of the portfolio, such as Turbonomic and Watson AIOps.
  • Lack of integrated security: IBM Instana does not have any integrated functions around security use cases. It relies on other areas of the IBM or Red Hat portfolio, such as Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes. These products do not share a common UI or data model with Instana, increasing inefficiencies for operators.


• Logz.io - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Open source: Logz.io heavily leverages OSS throughout its product set. It demonstrates how organizations interested in adopting an open-source observability strategy can evaluate and better understand the capabilities of these components. Organizations that have found self-managing these tools to be onerous and costly may wish to migrate to Logz.io to reduce their overhead.
  • Security: Logz.io has continued to make improvements that cater to security use cases, with the recent addition of a Kubernetes security context via integration to the open-source vulnerability scanning solution Aqua Trivy.
  • Cost-effective data management: Logz.io's new Data Optimization Hub builds on existing data management capabilities to optimize and filter log and metric data, reducing costs associated with ingestion and indexing.

  Cons:

  • UI consistency: Improvements have been made in the Kubernetes 360 interface, creating a unified view for monitoring Kubernetes environments. However, the fact that Logz.io is a collection of OSS is evident in the lack of uniformity across the UI, which can be confusing for some users.
  • Open-source approach: Logz.io provides clients the opportunity to leverage the benefits of OSS with the reassurance of a support agreement when needed. However, enterprises reliant on the partner-driven professional services associated with traditional commercial software will need to embrace an OSS approach to learning through community participation and engagement.
  • Agent sprawl: Separate client-side agents may be required to transmit different types of telemetry to the Logz.io platform. This may include Prometheus or Telegraf for time series, Fluentd or Fluent Bit for log data, and Logz.io's own OpenTelemetry collector. This potentially increases complexity and adds to administrative burden.


• ManageEngine - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • New AI: Zoho Corporation has developed an AI engine that ManageEngine uses across its portfolio. ManageEngine APM helps teams with anomaly detection, predictive analytics and data visualization through reports/dashboards to obtain in-depth insights on performance issues.
  • Pricing for SMBs and MSPs: ManageEngine's products are competitively priced and straightforward to implement for smaller enterprises with limited budgets and staff. They are also suitable for organizations offering services to other businesses in an MSP model.
  • Broad portfolio: ManageEngine's portfolio of products extends the company's capabilities beyond APM to include IT operations functions, such as network monitoring, infrastructure and ITSM help desk.

  Cons:

  • Large enterprises: ManageEngine solutions are rarely seen in large organizations. Gartner clients have mentioned issues with scaling the solution for complex and/or large environments.
  • Limited integration for DevOps/SRE: Clients looking for an APM and observability solution that integrates with modern DevOps and SRE practices, such as SLO management and feature flags, will struggle to integrate ManageEngine into their workflows.
  • Variable integration capability: ManageEngine has a long list of integrations, but many are limited in scope, making integrations with other areas of IT, such as DevOps toolchains, lengthy and more complex.


• Microsoft - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Data management: The Basic log data plan allows organizations to reduce ingestion and retention costs for high-volume logs used primarily for troubleshooting. Data collection transformations enable customers to filter, sanitize and enrich log data at ingest time.
  • Autoinstrumentation: Azure Monitor Application Insights supports codeless/agentless autoinstrumentation for applications developed in languages such as Java and Microsoft.net and running on a variety of Azure services, including Azure App Service, Azure Functions, Azure Kubernetes Service and virtual machines. This can simplify the adoption of Application Insights.
  • Advanced alerting: The Azure Monitor alerting capabilities have been substantially revised and offer an extremely flexible mechanism to identify and be notified of anomalies in collected telemetry. This includes smart detection, which can call attention to health and performance anomalies that customers are not otherwise monitoring for.

  Cons:

  • Limited adoption of monitoring outside of Azure: Microsoft has positioned Azure Monitor as a solution for monitoring workloads hosted outside Azure and those hosted in other cloud providers. Adoption of Azure Monitor for use outside of Azure has been limited, and potential clients should carefully evaluate whether Azure Monitor can provide the same benefits as a dedicated solution.
  • Delayed OTel collector support: Azure Monitor can ingest OpenTelemetry data via an exporter, but support for ingestion of OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) directly via a collector interface is not yet available. There are open-source workarounds available, and Microsoft's commitment to OpenTelemetry is clear, but is lagging competitors in this respect.
  • Cost predictability: Azure Monitor is priced based on consumption, as is common with public-cloud-based services. The number of consumable services and the complexity of the levers involved makes comparison with other vendors difficult.


• New Relic - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Business model and pricing: New Relic's consumption-based pricing allows customers to purchase New Relic based on two elements — volume of data ingested and number of New Relic users. For organizations discouraged by host-based licensing, New Relic offers an alternative that can translate to reduced TCO.
  • Customer experience: From their onboarding framework, to training and professional services, to the Explorers Hub forum, New Relic offers a variety of ways for customers to learn, grow and get their questions answered. The annual FutureStack users conference has facilitated the exchange of ideas on much broader topics than application monitoring. Time to value is a common concern of organizations evaluating APM and observability solutions, and the resources New Relic makes available can help optimize this.
  • Consolidated data platform: New Relic's telemetry data platform (TDP) is a storage and analytics engine optimized for telemetry management and built on its New Relic database (NRDB) technology. Other vendors in the APM and observability space are discovering the benefits of this architecture now, while New Relic has had NRDB in place for years.

  Cons:

  • Limited geographic footprint: New Relic is a SaaS-only provider of APM and observability software and its service delivery platforms are located in the U.S. and EMEA (Germany). The SaaS platforms are largely hosted in AWS, and an Azure-based option — also in the U.S. — was introduced in 2022. Organizations outside North America and EMEA, particularly those in APAC, may have concerns about latency or data sovereignty when these are the only options available.
  • Creeping commercial complexity: When New Relic transitioned to their consumption pricing, its simplicity was an important aspect of the change. Since then, complexity has started to inch its way back in. As part of the Codestream IDE integration, the company added a third type of user license, and in 2022, an additional tier of data ingest was added as well. Although this is still well short of the capability-based SKUs that were in place before, organizations assessing the product are faced with the challenge of navigating the additional options.
  • Security monitoring: New Relic has been slow to incorporate native security monitoring and attack mitigation capabilities in its product. Vulnerability management and IAST scanning are available and integration with third-party security products and services via the Instant Observability program can also bridge the gap; however, this requires customers to purchase additional products to do so.


• Oracle - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Multicloud support: Among the cloud service providers represented in this research, Oracle has consistently had the most consistent support for multicloud workloads. This may be partially due to their need to support Oracle E-Business-Suite (EBS) applications running anywhere, but their vision and capabilities already go beyond what would be necessary for that.
  • Sales strategy: Unlike some CSPs, Oracle has an explicit sales strategy and objectives for its OCI observability and monitoring products. Oracle customers, even those not using OCI, may obtain operational benefits from OCI O&M.
  • Geographic coverage: In addition to Oracle's worldwide, direct presence, the distributed cloud (Cloud@Customer) and edge (Roving Edge Infrastructure) services give Oracle's O&M offerings extremely broad availability, even in areas without a full OCI region.

  Cons:

  • Product longevity: Oracle's O&M is built on a comparatively recent codebase and may be less mature in some areas than in more established products. Capabilities also favor Oracle-specific tools and platforms. Although support for open source, such as OpenTelemetry, is very good, use of the product outside of the Oracle ecosystem is spotty.
  • Sampling granularity: Oracle APM's trace-sampling capability is extremely detailed and powerful, but does not include a tail-sampling capability at this time. Organizations that require tail sampling will need to manage sampling on their own, such as with an OpenTelemetry collector.
  • Oracle-centric pricing model: As with other portfolio vendors with vast product offerings, Oracle's pricing model of universal credits is optimized for its customer base, limiting the appeal for non-Oracle customers and prospects looking for stand-alone APM and observability solutions.


• Riverbed - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Digital Experience Monitoring: Aternity provides DEM capabilities in the form of real-user monitoring, synthetic monitoring and endpoint monitoring. In addition, Aternity can compare KPIs with industry benchmarks, which enables operators to focus on providing differentiated service in key areas.
  • Endpoint agent: Aternity's device performance monitoring agent enables the collection of detailed health, performance and user experience telemetry from workstations and other client devices. Organizations that need to monitor applications used internally may benefit from this additional insight.
  • Cross-domain visibility: As Riverbed continues to integrate Aternity with the Alluvio platform, customers will gain access to an increasingly unified experience. Organizations that require NPM to be integrated with DEM and APM should assess the Riverbed options.

  Cons:

  • Usability: Customers have expressed in Gartner client interactions that Aternity is hard to use and operationalize. Clients have also commented that support from the vendor needs to improve.
  • Low APM market awareness: Aternity has a significant focus on the DEM aspect of APM, with less market awareness of its core APM capabilities.
  • Pending ownership change: In recent years, Aternity has been part of Riverbed, then a separate entity Aternity, before returning to Riverbed and being rebranded as Alluvio. With the impending acquisition by Vector Capital, clients will need certainty around future product development.


• ServiceNow - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • A bridge for modern operations: ServiceNow's core is in serving traditional IT operations teams, with its ITSM and ITOM solutions the de facto standard in many large organizations. With the advent of Cloud Observability, ServiceNow customers that are building and operating cloud-native workloads have access to a modern observability solution from a trusted vendor.
  • Strong vision and credibility: ServiceNow Cloud Observability — as Lightstep — has been a pioneer of distributed tracing, and has continued to lead the industry as observability standards and practices for modern applications are established. It is safe to say that OpenTelemetry, at least, would not be what it is today without the work that was done by Lightstep's founders.
  • Acquisition of Era Software: Although to date, Cloud Observability's capabilities have centered on ingesting time series and trace telemetry, in late 2022, ServiceNow announced the acquisition of Era Software, a former Gartner Cool Vendor. Integrating Era into Cloud Observability allows for the ingestion of high volumes of log file data in a cost-efficient manner. With the combined functionality, ServiceNow has the key components necessary to deliver a modern observability platform.

  Cons:

  • Integration with ServiceNow: Previous ServiceNow acquisitions have been rearchitected to form part of the ServiceNow Now platform, providing a simple framework for implementation. To date, Cloud Observability has remained a separate solution. With ServiceNow having made some recent integration enhancements around OpenTelemetry and logging, clients should carefully evaluate how the ServiceNow roadmap and product announcements will affect their Cloud Observability implementations.
  • Limited awareness: Gartner inquiries with ServiceNow clients indicate very low awareness of the Cloud Observability solution, with many clients evaluating other vendors in this report without consideration of ServiceNow's offering.
  • Geographical limitations: Currently, Cloud Observability's only point of presence is in North America, creating data sovereignty and performance-based issues for deployment in other geographical areas.


• SolarWinds - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Broad portfolio: SolarWinds frequently appears in conversations with clients, and they have a wide suite of products, covering much of the typical IT operations workload. Solutions beyond APM include database monitoring, network monitoring and security tools.
  • Pricing for SMBs: SolarWinds pricing is generally seen as attractive for clients in the SMB space who have little previous experience in implementing APM tools. The new pricing for Hybrid Cloud Observability should make it easier for clients to understand and control their spend for observability solutions. In particular, it is likely to be an attractive option for companies looking to implement APM with a limited budget.
  • SaaS solution: With the new SolarWinds Observability suite, SolarWinds is offering a SaaS deployment framework for its observability solution. This will mean shorter implementation times, providing a quicker time to value for new deployments.

  Cons:

  • Confusing portfolio: SolarWinds' portfolio for observability includes multiple products: SolarWinds Observability, Hybrid Cloud Observability, AppOptics and others. It is not easy for clients to discern which product is suitable for a particular use case, nor simple to identify those that have a significant roadmap of investment.
  • Upgrade path: Many clients have extensive legacy implementations of SolarWinds tools monitoring their networks, servers and databases. Upgrades to Hybrid Cloud Observability are available today, but as the company builds out the new SaaS tools, it is unclear when migration paths for on-premises clients will be available.
  • Concerns around 2020 supply chain attack: Some Gartner clients, particularly those in non-IT roles, such as procurement, legal and vendor risk management team members, still raise concerns related to the 2020 supply chain attack. IT operations teams who have evaluated SolarWinds and are looking to implement it in their environment should be prepared to deal with these concerns and questions, which may otherwise delay or cancel implementation.


• Splunk - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • OpenTelemetry support: Splunk Observability Cloud is OpenTelemetry-native. It does not require any proprietary agents to enable ingestion and analysis of OTel. This makes the Splunk APM effective for cloud-native, service-based, and mesh app and service architecture (MASA) applications. Splunk has been a top contributor to the OTel project.
  • Expanding coverage: Splunk is a dominant vendor in large enterprises for log monitoring and SIEM. Existing Splunk customers looking to address observability gaps may benefit from adopting Splunk's observability solutions, which may also assist procurement and vendor risk management teams in reducing the number of external vendors under contract.
  • Scalability: Splunk is built on a highly elastic multitenant architecture that scales up automatically. Customers can burst up to 3x subscription rate to support elasticity. Rate limits per customer are adjustable and can be throttled.

  Cons:

  • Pricing: Splunk Observability Cloud is licensed by entity (host) or by usage (metric time series and traces analyzed per minute), while Splunk Enterprise is licensed by volume of data ingested or by workload (Splunk Virtual Compute). Pricing comprehension and predictability may be a challenge for customers and prospects, as well as understanding which pricing models are optimal and how that may change over time.
  • Security Threat Detection: Splunk Observability Cloud does not provide or produce threat or vulnerability data. However, customers can add both threat intelligence and vulnerability data from events in Splunk security tools or third-party sources.
  • Missing log support: Splunk Observability Cloud lacks in-product support for ingestion and analysis of log data. Customers that desire integrated log support must separately license Splunk Enterprise or Splunk Cloud and enable the Log Observer Connect bridge.


• Sumo Logic - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Pricing model: Sumo Logic's pricing model is based on capacity, credit and data tiering. This makes it easy for clients to analyze and manage costs as their data grows. Sumo Logic contracts are essentially drawdown contracts, in which clients purchase credits that may be used for any product in the portfolio.
  • Telemetry deployment flexibility: Sumo Logic supports multiple agents for collecting data, based on the source and data type. Sumo Logic collects telemetry from applications, OSs, databases and end users through its full support for OpenTelemetry and its proprietary agent, based on customer preference.
  • Cloud integration: Sumo Logic has strong native integrations with cloud service providers (CSPs). It can ingest and analyze data from multiple clouds, including AWS, Azure, GCP and private clouds.

  Cons:

  • Product awareness: Gartner rarely sees Sumo Logic as a shortlisted vendor during client interactions. Awareness around their offering is very low, with little apparent promotion of the solution from the vendor.
  • Organizational stability: Sumo Logic's acquisition by a private equity firm was completed in May 2023. Existing customers are advised to enter into an early dialogue with their account team to discuss their plans, ensure that they can lock in pricing, bring forward negotiations, and if needed, explore alternatives.
  • AI and analytics: Sumo Logic is lagging competitors in use cases leveraging AI and advanced analytics capabilities, raising concerns regarding lack of committed investment in this area.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability, 5 July 2023, ID G00774338

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