Observability Platforms
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.
Market Definition
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 pre-emptive, problem remediation. Observability platforms are used by IT operations, site reliability engineers, cloud and platform teams, application developers and product owners.
Modern businesses rely heavily on critical digital applications and services, which are revenue-generating, client-facing and important to the efficient operation of the business. Outages, performance degradation and unreliability directly impact top-line revenue, client sentiment and brand perception.
Observability platforms are used by organizations to understand and improve the availability, performance and resilience of these critical applications and services. Investment in and successful deployment of observability platforms leads to revenue loss avoidance and enables faster product development cycles and improvements in brand perception.
Example use-case scenarios or business problems addressed by observability platforms include:
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IT operations: IT operations teams responsible for live production environments are tasked with ensuring that applications and services are available, responsive and performant at all times — and especially during periods of high demand. Observability platforms allow these teams to be alerted when issues are detected, and make it possible to interrogate the data to identify the underlying cause.
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Platform engineering: Platform engineers’ use of observability platforms resembles that of IT operations as well as software development. Observability platforms help these teams ensure that production environments consistently meet service-level objectives, in addition to supporting data-driven continuous improvement and platform evolution.
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Software development: Development teams use observability platforms as an integrated part of the CI/CD pipeline, providing rapid feedback on code deployments. This enables faster delivery of new features, as well as improved product resilience.
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Business analyst: Business analysts may use observability platforms to understand and analyze key business metrics. These metrics are often specific to the organization and client (for example., a retailer measuring the cost of abandoned shopping carts and average customer spend).
Report 2025
Here is a summary of the vendors featured in the Gartner magic quadrant 2025 report.
For the full analysis and detailed insights, you can read the report
here
and view the magic quadrant graphic
here.
| Market Status | Market Vendor |
|---|---|
Leader |
Dynatrace |
Leader |
Datadog |
Leader |
Grafana Labs |
Leader |
New Relic |
Leader |
Elastic |
Leader |
Splunk |
Leader |
IBM |
Leader |
Chronosphere |
Visionary |
Honeycomb |
Visionary |
Coralogix |
Visionary |
ScienceLogic |
Visionary |
Apica |
Niche Player |
Sumo Logic |
Niche Player |
BMC Helix |
Niche Player |
ITRS |
Niche Player |
SolarWinds |
Challenger |
Amazon Web Services |
Challenger |
Microsoft |
Challenger |
LogicMonitor |
Challenger |
Oracle |
Report 2024
Here is a summary of the vendors featured in the Gartner magic quadrant 2024 report.
For the full analysis and detailed insights, you can read the report
here
and view the magic quadrant graphic
here.
| Market Status | Market Vendor |
|---|---|
Leader |
Dynatrace |
Leader |
Datadog |
Leader |
New Relic |
Leader |
Grafana Labs |
Leader |
Splunk |
Leader |
Chronosphere |
Leader |
Elastic |
Visionary |
Honeycomb |
Visionary |
LogicMonitor |
Visionary |
IBM |
Visionary |
ServiceNow |
Visionary |
Logz.io |
Niche Player |
Oracle |
Niche Player |
BMC |
Niche Player |
Sumo Logic |
Challenger |
Amazon Web Services |
Challenger |
Microsoft |