Network Observability: Managing Performance Across Hybrid Networks

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Sponsored by:
Network Observability:
Managing Performance Across
Hybrid Networks
Shamus McGillicuddy
VP of Research
Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)
Network Infrastructure and Operations

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Watch the On-Demand Webinar
Network Observability: Managing Performance Across Hybrid Networks
On-Demand Webinar: https://ema.wistia.com/medias/8zi92svjxa
© 2025 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

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Featured Speaker
Shamus is a Vice President of Research at EMA,
where he leads the network infrastructure and
operations practice. He has nearly two decades of
experience in the IT industry. His research focuses on
all aspects of managing enterprise networks,
including network automation, AIOps-driven network
operations, multi-cloud networking, and WAN
transformation.
© 2025 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. 3
Shamus McGillicuddy
Vice President of Research
Network Infrastructure and Operations
Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)

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Sponsors

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Research Goals and
Methodology

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The Rise of a New Marketing Term
”Network observability” emerged as terminology for tools
traditionally described as:
Network Vendors are trying to communicate
advancement and innovation of their products.
Network monitoring
Network fault management
Network performance management
Network performance management and diagnostics
Etc.
What should you expect? What should you demand?

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Job titles
13.4% Network engineers/architects/analysts
10.0% IT project/program managers
52.2% IT managers/supervisors/directors
24.5% IT executives (VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
Functional groups/departments
30.2% Network/IT operations
20.5% IT executive suite
16.2% IT project/program management
15.7% Network engineering
8.8% IT asset and financial
management/IT business analysis
4.6% Cloud/DevOps
4.0% IT architecture
Top industries
22.5% Manufacturing
20.5% Banking/Finance/Insurance
11.4% Retail
8.5% Health care
5.4% Higher education
5.1% Professional services
(not related to IT)
Region
66.7% United States
33.3% Europe (UK/France/Germany)
Company size (employees)
23.1% Midsized (1,000 to 2,499)
59.2% Enterprise (2,500 to 9,999)
17.7% Large enterprise (10,000+)
EMA Surveyed 351 Network Observability Stakeholders and Interviewed Seven Tool
Experts One on One

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What is Network
Observability?

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Since 2022, IT Pros Who Describe Their NetOps Tools as “Network Observability”
Increased From 20% to 48%
Which of the following words and phrases do you most associate with the concept of network observability?

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The Practitioner’s View
“Network observability is a more holistic approach, where you are
collecting a lot more data and finding patterns of anomalous behavior.
It’s more proactive, where you try to detect issues ahead of time.”
Monitoring tool architect
Fortune 500 media company
“Network observability refers to your awareness and ability to have eyes on the
network and how it’s actually performing, functioning, and being utilized.”
Infrastructure manager
Fortune 500 energy utility company
“Network observability means having that holistic view of the network, being
able to see all your endpoints and nodes and what’s going on with them.”
Network management tool architect
$30 billion bank

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A Definition of Network Observability
A network observability solution collects and visualizes large
and diverse volumes of network data to provide actionable
insights about network state.
This drives proactive management of availability,
performance, experience, capacity, and security.

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Some Examples of
What Should You
Look For

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Diverse Data at Volume
94% of IT Organizations: We Collect More Network Data Than Ever Before
Have any of the following types of network data become more important or less important to the
management and monitoring of your network over the last three years?

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Foundational Platform Characteristics
When evaluating network observability solutions, which of the following
capabilities is most important to you?

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Essential Features and Capabilities
”Very Important” Network Observability
Capabilities
Essential alert management features
31%
29%
28%
31%
31%
29%
Essential troubleshooting features
Event correlation – incidents vs. alerts
Automated notifications/escalations
Triggered runbooks and automated workflows
Reports on network changes
Anomaly detection
AI-enabled root-cause analysis
Multiple metrics overlaid for time series analysis
28%
71%
66%
60%
End-to-end insights across multiple network
domains
Multi-vendor support
Observability of individual network experience
Observability of unmanaged networks
59%

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Example: 20% say it’s essential for alerts to offer recommended actions
Speaking of AI-Enabled Root-Cause Analysis…
59% say it’s very important for
network observability solutions
to have AI-driven features
Only 42% fully trust these
AI features today
Anticipated benefits of AI-driven network observability
58%
54%
54%
Operational efficiency
Proactive problem prevention
Network optimization

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How are People
Doing with Network
Observability?
17

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Network Observability Satisfaction is Soft
Only 43% believe they are completely successful with their tools today
59% believe they will replace incumbent network observability
tools within two years
Tool sprawl is prevalent: 57% use three or more tools and nearly
all want to consolidate
Alert noise is rampant: 55% of alerts are not actionable

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Top Complaints About Network Observability Tools

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Scope Limitations in Detail
85% say their tools struggle to
collect data from certain
domains of their network:
44% Networks used by
remote workers
38% Public cloud
33% SD-WAN
29% Internet connectivity
28% SASE
“Many network vendors lack APIs or have totally crap
APIs, so I have to go through a lot of effort to build
custom tooling to get structured data from every
device in the format that I want.”
Network engineer
Billion-dollar fintech company
“Trying to onboard data that isn’t supported out of the
box is too much work.”
Fortune 500 retailer

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Tool Customizability Must Improve
“I’m not content with tools we can get off the shelf. That’s why we go custom with Prometheus
and other open source tools. You can customize them and make them as smart as you want
to. I’ve never been limited by them, but it's a lot of work.”
Network engineer
Billion-dollar fintech company
“One of the main problems with our vendor-provided tools is the customization of dashboards.
A lot of things are hard-coded. If you want to add labels for filtration and other customizations,
it doesn’t work. It doesn’t allow you to customize its dashboards and reports enough.”
Fortune 500 retailer
“The biggest thing for me is the ability for users to customize how they want to see the data. I
want more flexibility in visualization engines. As a system architect, I can come up with multiple
use cases and build them into the tool, but I can’t predict everything that users will need. So,
tools need customization features to personalize user experience.”
Monitoring tool architect
Fortune 500 media company

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Final Thoughts
Network observability is a mainstream concept
Let it drive you to demand more from your vendors:
Check out the full report for more
in-depth insights, plus:
• The future of streaming network
telemetry
• Factors that drive tool replacement
• The role of open source tools
• Impacts of tool sprawl
• Managing individual network
experiences
Data collection
scalability and
data diversity
Actionable insights
across different
networks
AI-enabled
analytics and
automation

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The network observability report is now available!
Learn more and download:
https://bit.ly/ema-network-
observability-2025

Network Observability: Managing Performance Across Hybrid Networks

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