Organizations must always be ready to pivot on a dime and adjust their business goals when the market—or their customers—demand it. Whether driven by industry changes or developments in market trends, when goals shift at the top, the teams who execute against them must follow suit. Since network infrastructure is becoming increasingly complex to fit business needs, IT teams are part of these initiatives.
In March 2023, Gartner produced a market research report primarily focusing on infrastructure monitoring tools.
We feel the goal was to provide network infrastructure and operations leaders with a list of things to consider when upgrading their tech stack. Suppose the leaders need to increase the visibility of their infrastructure, improve the insights into anomalies, or both. In that case, the market provides a list of infrastructure monitoring software solutions for them to choose for their specific needs.
What Is the Importance of Infrastructure Monitoring Tools?
Before we get into the results of their research, let’s review the basics of infrastructure monitoring in the present-day market.
In the report, Gartner defines infrastructure monitoring tools as software designed "to capture the health and resource utilization of IT infrastructure components, no matter where they reside (e.g., in a data center, at the edge, infrastructure as a service [IaaS] or platform as a service [PaaS] in the cloud)."
Infrastructure monitoring tools will enable network administrators and managers to observe and report, among other aspects, the availability of servers, data utilization and virtual and on-premises databases. Most infrastructure monitoring tools will collect information in real-time and, in turn, perform historical analyses or find trends in the data.
What Gartner Market Research Uncovered About Infrastructure Monitoring Tools
The key takeaways from Gartner report include the ongoing trends below within the infrastructure monitoring tool market:
- Vendors in the application performance monitoring (APM) and artificial intelligence for IT operations platforms (AIOps) markets offer integrated infrastructure monitoring capability with a focus on “full-stack monitoring.”
- Infrastructure monitoring tools have become commoditized, and vendors are offering analytics as a way to distinguish themselves.
- Support for observability is becoming a key requirement for organizations leveraging cloud-native architectures. These organizations are leveraging vendors in the APM and observability market, diminishing the importance of pure play infrastructure monitoring vendors for cloud-native monitoring.
- Business leaders are increasingly influencing tool-procurement decisions, bringing a top-down assessment criteria to decisions that historically have used a bottom-up approach. In such organizations, the focus shifts to quality of outcomes, rather than technical depth.
What Can Networking and IT Professionals Learn From the Report?
The use cases Gartner uncovered for current and future network administrators could serve as a blueprint to figure out best practices for their organization. Examples of these use cases in the research study are listed below:
- Broaden the horizon beyond anomaly detection and troubleshooting as the main focus areas for infrastructure monitoring tools especially because teams like SRE, DevOps and business leaders are interested in enhancements, efficiencies and better decision-making, respectively.
- Invest in “good enough” infrastructure monitoring tools over costly best-of-breed — especially for resilient, fault-tolerant architectures, but do not compromise on analytics for better root-cause analysis.
- Improve their troubleshooting capability by deploying infrastructure monitoring tools that can seamlessly monitor hybrid and multicloud IT architectures with inbuilt automated remediation.
- Provide contextualized insights for business leaders by deploying infrastructure monitoring tools with dynamic service discovery and relationship mapping.
Want to Know More About Infrastructure Monitoring Tools?
Are you curious to know more about the state of the infrastructure monitoring market? There is detailed information on what tools vendors are offering and what demands customers expect out of an infrastructure monitoring tool.