Report:
Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms
How does Gartner define the Observability Platforms market in 2025?
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.
Key Facts for Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms in 2025
- Publication Date: 7 July 2025
- Document ID: G00821166
- Coverage: Global
- Authors: Gregg Siegfried, Matt Crossley, and 3 more
- Core Purpose: Observability platforms are fundamentally changing how organizations manage system health, driven by innovations in analytics, cost optimization, and the emergence of AI observability. Heads of I&O can use this research to evaluate and navigate the evolving landscape of vendors and solutions.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
No strategic planning assumptions provided.
How was the Observability Platforms market evolved in 2025?
- Gartner expects the market for observability products to reach an estimated $14.2 billion by 2028, with an 11.1% CAGR between 2021 and 2028
- 20 vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant, with 5 new additions: Apica, Coralogix, ITRS, ScienceLogic, and SolarWinds
- Market characterized by high volatility with numerous acquisitions including Cisco's acquisition of Splunk, Broadcom acquiring VMware
- Cost-fatigue and demand for understandable cost/value equations reaching fever pitch among customers
- Increasing consolidation of monitoring domains and practices driven by shift toward application-focused outcomes
- AI observability emerging as key capability with vendors adding LLM monitoring features
- Growing adoption of OpenTelemetry, eBPF instrumentation, and telemetry pipeline solutions
- Central observability teams gaining adoption for managing SLOs, telemetry lifecycle, and tool selection
- Progressive delivery (feature flags) and release management becoming more interdependent with observability
- Leaders: Chronosphere, Datadog, Dynatrace, Elastic, Grafana Labs, IBM, New Relic, Splunk
- Challengers: Amazon Web Services, LogicMonitor, Microsoft, Oracle
- Visionaries: Apica, Coralogix, Honeycomb, ScienceLogic
- Niche Players: BMC Helix, ITRS, SolarWinds, Sumo Logic
What product features are required to be included in this year's evaluation?
- Ingest, store and analyze operational telemetry feeds, including (but not limited to) metrics, event, log and trace data.
- Identify and analyze changes in application, service and infrastructure behavior to determine the causes of outages, performance degradation and quantify their impact on end-user experience.
- Enrich telemetry by providing contextualization, such as topological dependency or service mapping.
- Support the modeling or mapping of relationships between monitored services and their role in business transactions.
- Collect telemetry from public cloud providers (for example, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure).
- Support interactive exploration and analysis of multiple telemetry types (including traces, metrics and logs) to generate insights about user and application behavior.
What are the common features of top products in the Observability Platforms space?
- Monitoring of digital experience of applications and services delivered via browser, mobile app and API.
- Integration with other operations, service management and software development technologies, such as IT service management (ITSM), configuration management database (CMDB), event and incident response management, orchestration and automation, and DevOps tools.
- Providing insights through the use of advanced analytics and machine learning that are otherwise not possible or feasible to derive through manual interrogation and analysis of data.
- Automated discovery and mapping of related infrastructure, network and application components and services.
- Cost management that supports measuring and optimizing application workload cost, as well as measuring and optimizing observability platform utilization or spend.
- Business process and activity monitoring reflecting user journeys such as login to check-out, funnel analysis to track conversion rates, customer onboarding or loan application.
- AI observability capabilities including the ability to analyze the performance, cost, capacity and compliance of large language models and associated generative AI workloads.
- Automation capabilities that support initiating changes to application and infrastructure code and configuration to optimize workload cost, capacity or performance, or to take corrective action to remediate failure or degradation.
- Application security functionality, such as the identification of known vulnerabilities in monitored applications and the ability to block attempts to exploit them.
Scope Exclusions
- Self-hosted only solutions without SaaS delivery option
- Products not meeting minimum revenue or growth thresholds
- Vendors without sufficient customer base (less than 50 paying customers)
- Vendors without presence in at least two geographic regions
- Products lacking required mandatory features or minimum common features support
- Solutions not available for direct purchase without mandatory professional services
Inclusion Criteria
Vendors must, among other requirements:
- Provide generally available capabilities as of 27 March 2025
- Sell the observability platform solution directly to paying customers without requiring professional services
- Demonstrate an active product roadmap and go-to-market strategies
- Have phone, email and/or web customer support in English
- Offer native support for all mandatory features and four of nine common features
- Must be delivered via SaaS (self-hosted alternatives optional but out of scope)
- At least 50 paying production customers in two or more geographic regions
- Generated at least $75 million in annual GAAP revenue in 12 months prior to March 2025, OR minimum $10 million annual revenue with 25% growth rate
Ability to Execute — Relative Weighting
- Product or Service - High
- Overall Viability - Medium
- Sales Execution/Pricing - Medium
- Market Responsiveness/Record - High
- Marketing Execution - Medium
- Customer Experience - High
- Operations - Low
Completeness of Vision — Relative Weighting
- Market Understanding - High
- Marketing Strategy - Medium
- Sales Strategy - Medium
- Offering (Product) Strategy - High
- Business Model - High
- Vertical/Industry Strategy - Not Rated
- Innovation - High
- Geographic Strategy - Medium
FAQs
Q: What does this research cover?
A: This research evaluates 20 observability platform vendors based on their ability to execute and completeness of vision. It covers products that ingest telemetry (metrics, logs, events, traces) from applications, services, and infrastructure to understand system health, performance, and behavior. The evaluation includes mandatory features like telemetry ingestion and analysis, as well as common features such as digital experience monitoring, AI/ML capabilities, cost management, and integration with IT operations tools. The research focuses on SaaS-delivered solutions and includes vendors meeting minimum thresholds of $75 million annual revenue or $10 million with 25% growth, serving at least 50 paying customers across multiple geographic regions.
Q: Who should use this research?
A: Heads of Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) should use this research to evaluate and select observability platform vendors based on their organizational needs. The research helps IT operations teams, site reliability engineers, cloud and platform teams, application developers, and product owners understand vendor capabilities for monitoring modern applications and infrastructure. It provides guidance for organizations seeking to improve availability, performance, and resilience of critical digital applications and services. The research is particularly valuable for organizations managing complex, cloud-native architectures, evaluating vendor consolidation opportunities, assessing AI-driven capabilities, and navigating cost optimization challenges in observability platform deployments.
Q: What are the mandatory features of vendors included in this market?
A: At a minimum, observability platforms must: ingest, store and analyze operational telemetry feeds including metrics, events, logs and traces; identify and analyze changes in application, service and infrastructure behavior to determine causes of outages and performance degradation; enrich telemetry by providing contextualization such as topological dependency or service mapping; support modeling or mapping of relationships between monitored services and their role in business transactions; collect telemetry from public cloud providers; and support interactive exploration and analysis of multiple telemetry types to generate insights about user and application behavior.
Q: What are some reasons for not being included in this report?
A:
- Did not meet the $75 million annual revenue threshold OR the $10 million revenue with 25% growth requirement
- Did not meet customer interest indicator (CII) threshold for market awareness
- Failed to meet the minimum customer base requirement of 50 paying production customers in two or more regions
- Does not offer SaaS delivery model (only self-hosted options)
- Lacks required mandatory features or minimum number of common features
- Does not sell directly to customers or requires mandatory professional services engagement
- Product not generally available as of evaluation date (March 27, 2025)
- Insufficient geographic presence (less than two regions)
- Does not provide support and documentation in English
Q: What differentiates Ability to Execute vs. Completeness of Vision?
A: Ability to Execute evaluates vendors on the quality and efficacy of their processes, systems, methods or procedures that enable competitive, efficient and effective performance, focusing on current market impact through product capabilities, sales execution, customer experience, and operational excellence. Completeness of Vision evaluates vendors on their ability to understand current market opportunities and articulate their vision for future market direction, innovation, and customer requirements, focusing on strategic direction through market understanding, product strategy, innovation, and business model for future success.
Reference
- Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms, 7 July 2025, ID G00821166
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