Network Observability – 5 Best Platforms for Observability

 

Today, we begin on an exciting adventure into the world of network observability, where network monitoring is given a bright makeover. While network monitoring has long been the steadfast guardian of network operations, Network Observability operators enters the fray like a caped hero, bringing a whole new level of awesomeness to the table.

If network monitoring is like inspecting a blueprint to check if everything is in order, network observability is the magical x-ray vision that shows the intricate inner workings of your network architecture. It's like having a psychic link with your network, understanding every heartbeat and whisper, and discovering abnormalities before they start creating problems.

This blog article is intended to be your trustworthy guide through the fascinating world of networks observability. We'll dive deep into what it is and its top network observability tools.

What is Network Observability?

Network observability refers to the ability to leverage a variety of data sources to get insight into a network's internal events and how internal network conditions affect business objectives and user experience.

Observability is simply the ability to swiftly and readily answer queries about one's network. Network observability can provide value by lowering the mean time to resolution (MTTR) and increasing team productivity.

The 3 Key Factors of Network Observability

Three fundamental components are required for Network Observability market: logs, metrics, and traces. These elements enable firms to automate their analytics and get insights from their telemetry data, resulting in intelligent actions.

1. Logs

Logs are immutable system events and error recordings stored in plain text or binary format, including metadata such as the timestamp, event type, and machine or user ID. These records are created for practically all network activities. Logs are particularly useful since their information gives a degree of detail that may be used to debug.

To achieve complete observability using the metadata gathered from the logs, you must collect and correlate it from several system components. A single log from a single component in your system cannot give entire contextual information.

2. Metrics

Metrics are numerical, quantifiable data that indicate how well your system is doing over time. These statistics are frequently statistically computed, summarized, aggregated, correlated, or averaged across time to detect anomalies, patterns, and trends.

These values are crucial for observability since they may be used to establish baselines and move forward using key performance indicators (KPIs).

3. Traces

Traces indicate the duration of a request as it moves across your network. Unlike logs and analytics, they give visibility into your request journeys. These variables are critical for observability since merely reviewing your trace provides information into health, reaction times, error rates, and throughput. You can also proactively address possible problems. Network traces, for example, can be utilised to identify packet-level data, monitor late latency, and detect network intrusions, malware, and other security risks. However, it is vital to realize that network tracing produces a large amount of data, therefore concentrating on specific issues is critical to avoiding information overload.

5 Top Network Observability Tools

Here are a few network observability tools that can help you get started:

Hybrid Cloud Observability

Hybrid Cloud Observability is a self-hosted, full-stack observability software based on SolarWinds® for hybrid cloud environments. This platform uses the data provided to observe health and equip visibility into your cloud apps and network infrastructure. Hybrid Cloud Observability stands out because of its automated discovery, application warnings, intelligent mapping, historical and real-time dashboards, and effortless connection along with monitoring systems. The technology operates smoothly with monitoring platforms such as AppOptics™ and Security Observability, providing users with enhanced insight across IT infrastructure.

Finally, Hybrid Cloud Observability incorporates customized reporting and SolarWinds AIOps, an intelligent AIOps tool that makes it easy to monitor and manage inbound connections throughout your application stack.

SolarWinds Observability

SolarWinds® Observability is a SaaS platform that gives users visibility and a single, comprehensive view of their cloud-native, on-premises, and hybrid infrastructures. This solution's abilities go beyond what a normal observability tool would offer. This product's ability to provide full-stack, multi-source log management, AIOps improved observability, and monitoring across many environments sets it apart. It also monitors networks, web applications, websites, logs, Kubernetes, actual users, nodes, Java, PHP performance, and Python. SolarWinds Observability also integrates and supports several databases, channels, apps, and languages.

Yet, SolarWinds Observability AIOps can aid you in proactively addressing issues and streamlining the administration of your dispersed environments via its user-friendly interface.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace is a complete AI-powered data and network infrastructure observability tool for current multi-cloud systems. This platform provides huge insight into your IT environment, including extensive data and access to over 600 third-party technologies, SDKs, and plugins.

Dynatrace's causal AI enables you to go beyond surface-level analysis and do root-cause analysis more effectively and securely. Furthermore, the platform allows customers to give a complete picture of their virtualized network architecture and immediately spot changes. Dynatrace also furnishes cloud automation, open ingestion, and digital experience monitoring.

Datadog

Datadog is a contemporary monitoring and observability platform that equips network and application performance monitoring. One of its main selling features is that it delivers your team with a unified real-time platform for monitoring infrastructure, network, and application performance. Aside from the capacity to respond to real-time network information, the platform also sustains over 500 built-in third-party connectors.

Other fascinating capabilities include the ability to examine DNS performance without needing to SSH into individual computers also analyze traffic to managed cloud services. Metrics such as request volume, response time, and error codes can be used to measure DNS server health. These features and capabilities allow companies to keep an eye on their networks and address issues before they harm their consumers.

Kentik

Kentik enables companies to deliver full Network Observability tools across all multi-cloud deployments, as well as real-time insight into their network environments. Kentik not only serves as a centralized interface that provides customers with visibility over their network traffic and flow, but it also contains a REST API that enables smooth integration with third-party apps.

The major features of this SaaS solution are network diagnostics and comprehensive multi-cloud and hybrid cloud network visibility across on-premises and containerized systems. Other services offered by Kentik include synthetic monitoring to evaluate network performance under controlled settings, connection cost optimization for cost savings, and network performance monitoring to check network infrastructure health. These capabilities allow organizations to gain AI-driven insights, proactively manage performance bottlenecks, and prevent vulnerabilities.

Before choosing any tool, you must consider all the aspects and conducting thorough research or Market intelligence reports act as a crucial compass in the journey of choosing the ideal network observability tool. These reports distil vast amounts of industry data, providing a comprehensive overview of available tools, their functionalities, and how they align with market trends. By analysing Quadrant Knowledge Solutions’ Network Observability market share, 2022, Worldwide reports, organizations gain a nuanced understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of various tools in relation to their specific networking needs. These insights facilitate informed decision-making, guiding recommendations based on the report's evaluations of vendor reliability, feature comparisons, future projections, and real-world use cases. Essentially, market intelligence’ Market Forecast: Network Observability, 2022-2027, Worldwide reports serve as a strategic roadmap, steering organizations towards the most fitting Network Observability operator that aligns with their unique requirements and overarching goals.

Summary

Network Observability operator has grown in importance in recent years as the network environment has changed and current networking setups and designs have become more complicated. It's critical to obtain visibility into complicated networks, enhance performance, and achieve business objectives.

The next step is to select a network observability tools, such as SolarWinds Observability. It includes everything you need to obtain visibility throughout your complicated network environment. Observability is all about identifying problems and proactively automating solutions to address them.