Network Observability Buyers’ Guide 2025

State of the market: Network observability tools collect, analyze, and visualize performance, health, and behavior information from across your network. This can help your team to ensure your different network components are running reliably, efficiently, and securely.

The global observability tools market was valued at approximately USD 2.94 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.7% to reach a value of USD 5.4 billion in 2030.
Growth is being driven by a need for visibility over increasingly complex IT environments and a need for robust troubleshooting capabilities for cloud computing services.
Growth has also been driven by the availability of open-source observability tools, which have made this market more accessible to small- and mid-sized organizations by reducing the cost of implementation.

Why Trust Us: We’ve researched and demoed several leading network observability and monitoring solutions, spoken to organizations of all sizes about their network management challenges and the features that are most useful to them, and interviewed executives from leading providers in the network management space.

You can find our product reviews, interviews, and Top 10 shortlists to the best network observability products on the market in our Network Monitoring And Management Hub.

Our Recommendations: Before we get into the nitty-gritty of network observability, here are our top tips to bear in mind while you’re comparing solutions to help you choose the right one for your business:

For growing businesses: If you’re a large enterprise, or you’re planning on being one at some point in the future, make sure you find a solution that can scale to support a growth in network traffic flow. This will be key to ensuring it performs well, even as your business grows.
For best performance: No matter your company’s size or industry, you need to pick a solution that covers all the different aspects of your network. If you choose a tool that only covers some components, you’ll be left with blind spots and the solution’s ability to provide network intelligence will be impeded. What could that mean? Performance drops, outages, and data breaches… All of which are best avoided, if you ask us.
For over-burdened teams: Look for a solution that utilizes AI or automation to help reduce your workload. You’ve got enough on your plate already—let the solution take care of the data analysis and respond to less complex issues for you.

How Network Observability Works: Network observability tools can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud, and usually offer integrations with other cloud services or network devices. You can also deploy them as an agent on certain devices, depending on what you want to monitor.

Once deployed, network observability platforms gather performance, health, and behavior data from sources across your network, such as network devices, endpoints, and cloud infrastructure. They then analyze this data and present it in an accessible, easy-to-read format, giving you real-time insights into how your network is running.

Benefits Of Network Observability: There are four main benefits to implementing a network observability tool:

Problem detection: Network observability solutions can help you detect and resolve issues such as bandwidth constraints, packet-loss, high latency, and compliance violations.
Security threat detection: By identifying and analyzing unusual behaviors, network observability tools can help you detect potential and current security threats within your network. By detecting attacks early on, you can proactively take steps to mitigate them and limit the amount of damage the attacker can do.
Performance optimization: Network observability tools highlight any performance issues across your network that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. By resolving these issues, you can improve performance and, in turn, productivity.
Faster troubleshooting: Network observability solutions give you a detailed overview of your entire network from a single interface, eliminating blind spots and ensuring all issues are reported. This makes it easier for you to spot problems, so you can resolve them more quickly.

Common Network Observability Challenges: Like many cybersecurity products, teams that implement network observability tools often find themselves facing some common challenges. To help you get the most out of your implementation, here’s a list of those challenges and how you can overcome them:

Vast amounts of data: Network observability tools generate a large amount of data throughput that can be complex to manage and understand. We recommend defining clear filters that highlight the issues most important to your organization. This will reduce data overload, and help you get to the information you need more quickly.
Implementation challenges: The initial implementation of a network observability tool can be complex as you have to integrate it with every component within your network. However, if you rush this stage, you can end up with blind spots that aren’t covered by your observability tool. We recommendmapping out your environment and taking your time with the configuration process to make sure that all aspects of your network are covered. While this requires more up-front investment, it’ll make the solution more effective in the long-term.
Coverage: Some solutions simply don’t cover all aspects of a network, instead focusing on a specific area (e.g., cloud infrastructure, endpoints). This can also leave you with blind spots. We recommendchoosing a solution that covers all the different types of infrastructure your organization is currently using. This information should be readily available on the provider’s website.

Best Network Observability Providers: Our team of cybersecurity analysts and researchers has put together a shortlist of the best providers of network observability solutions, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:

Features Checklist: When comparing network observability solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:

Topology mapping: Look for a tool that can map the layout of your network, including traffic flow and device dependencies. This will a) give you visibility into all areas of the network and ensure that they’re all covered, and b) help you visualize the impact of any security or performance issues that you uncover.
Data collection: Your chosen solution should be able to gather data in real-time from all the different components of your network, including different types of endpoints and operating systems.
Data analysis: The best network observability tools offer powerful analysis capabilities, often using AI to help you get the most out of the vast amounts of data they produce. This analysis should include what issues exist, along with how they occurred (root cause analysis) and what impact they’re likely to have.
Data visualization: Your chosen solution should present its findings in a user-friendly, easy-to-digest format. It should convey information visually using maps and visualizations, and you should be able to customize your reporting dashboards so that you can quickly access the information that’s most important to your business.
Anomaly detection: To help you identify existing and potential security threats, a strong network observability tool should use AI and/or ML to detect unusual or anomalous behaviors.
Alerting: Your tool should notify you in a timely manner to any issues it detects. Alerts should be actionable and provide relevant contextual information that will make it easy for you to understand what the problem is and how you can solve it. The best solutions allow you to customize your alerts so that team members are only notified of incidents that are relevant to them.
API support: To help streamline deployment, look for a solution that you can integrate via API. There are two parts to this: integrating it with your network components and integrating it with other tools in your security stack (e.g., SIEM/log management tools).

Future Trends: As the network observability market continues to grow, we expect to see some key evolutions:

First, we predict that there will be a shift towards unified platforms that integrate network, application, and infrastructure observability.

Many IT professionals are calling out for a simpler, more manageable approach to security.
Unifying these three components could eliminate blind spots caused by implementing disparate solutions and reduce management overhead by enabling teams to access all their health, performance, and behavior data from a single interface.

Second, as AI continues to develop, we expect network observability tools to further utilize this technology.

AI could allow network observability tools to generate predictive insights about network health and performance so businesses can plan maintenance tasks and budget for replacing components.
It will also improve the accuracy of automated remediation capabilities, enabling teams to focus their efforts on solving more complex issues.

Finally, as edge computing grows, we expect observability solutions to expand their capabilities to be able to monitor distributed environments more effectively.

Edge computing is a type of IT architecture where data is stored and processed closer to its source at the edge of the network, rather than in a central data center.

Further Reading: You can find all of our articles on network observability in our Network Monitoring And Management Hub.

No time to browse? Here are a few articles we think you’ll enjoy:

Shortlist: The Top 10 Observability Tools
Interview: Raffael Marty On How MSPs Can Secure Their Customers Amid A Turbulent Threat Landscape
Blog: What Are The Three Types Of Cyber Threat Intelligence?

Network Observability Buyers’ Guide 2025

How to choose the right network observability solution.