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Many Monitoring and Observability Tools Flood Enterprises with Noise, Not Insight

According to an analysis from 130 enterprise organizations using the BigPanda platform, the Monitoring and Observability Tool Effectiveness for IT Event Management report, the average enterprise sends 9.6 million observability events annually to the platform, but fewer than 1 in 5 (18%) are ever acted upon.

Compounding the issue, 27% of alerts occur on weekends, creating unnecessary pressure on already overburdened on-call teams.

"The research confirms what many IT leaders already suspect," said Fred Koopmans, Chief Product Officer at BigPanda. "More monitoring coverage doesn't automatically mean more actionability. Enterprises are investing heavily in observability, but without context, correlation, and enrichment, the signal gets lost."

The report features a monitoring and observability tool effectiveness matrix that shows no monitoring and observability tools combined both widespread usage and consistently high actionability. This signals that even the strongest platforms have room to grow, and the observability industry is still evolving toward optimal performance at scale.

Other key trends and insights include:

Full monitoring coverage doesn't equal value

Most enterprises are drowning in data, creating millions of events (9.6 million, on average) annually. Yet only 18% of incidents were actioned on average, underscoring the disconnect between the belief that comprehensive observability coverage of applications, services, and infrastructure equates to better ITOps, incident management, and customer outcomes.

Some high-coverage tools fall short on signal quality

Some tools contributed a large share of incidents, yet struggle with their lower actionability, highlighting that high usage does not necessarily translate to high operational value. These scalable but noisy tools may benefit from improved configuration and tuning to reduce noise and enhance the precision of alerts.

Full-stack observability is still an illusion

Despite the notion that enterprise organizations are centralizing and consolidating observability with full-stack observability tools, our data shows that enterprises still have a median of 20+ tools they use to monitor on-premises and cloud infrastructure, application and digital experience monitoring.

Open-source remains low-impact at enterprise scale

Despite their popularity among developers, most open-source observability platforms and monitoring tools have yet to deliver high-value, enterprise-grade observability outcomes. Our report shows they frequently produce low-quality signals rather than actionable insights.

Purpose-built monitoring tools tend to align as either specialists or stragglers

They either fell in the top-left quadrant (optimized, high-performance tools) or the bottom-left quadrant (underutilized tools) with lower adoption and weaker signal quality. This indicates that while some purpose-built monitoring tools deliver substantial niche value, others have yet to evolve into broader observability assets.

These results highlight a clear opportunity for IT leaders: consolidate around high-performing tools, decommission low-value ones, and use enriched event data to guide smarter investments.

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Many Monitoring and Observability Tools Flood Enterprises with Noise, Not Insight

According to an analysis from 130 enterprise organizations using the BigPanda platform, the Monitoring and Observability Tool Effectiveness for IT Event Management report, the average enterprise sends 9.6 million observability events annually to the platform, but fewer than 1 in 5 (18%) are ever acted upon.

Compounding the issue, 27% of alerts occur on weekends, creating unnecessary pressure on already overburdened on-call teams.

"The research confirms what many IT leaders already suspect," said Fred Koopmans, Chief Product Officer at BigPanda. "More monitoring coverage doesn't automatically mean more actionability. Enterprises are investing heavily in observability, but without context, correlation, and enrichment, the signal gets lost."

The report features a monitoring and observability tool effectiveness matrix that shows no monitoring and observability tools combined both widespread usage and consistently high actionability. This signals that even the strongest platforms have room to grow, and the observability industry is still evolving toward optimal performance at scale.

Other key trends and insights include:

Full monitoring coverage doesn't equal value

Most enterprises are drowning in data, creating millions of events (9.6 million, on average) annually. Yet only 18% of incidents were actioned on average, underscoring the disconnect between the belief that comprehensive observability coverage of applications, services, and infrastructure equates to better ITOps, incident management, and customer outcomes.

Some high-coverage tools fall short on signal quality

Some tools contributed a large share of incidents, yet struggle with their lower actionability, highlighting that high usage does not necessarily translate to high operational value. These scalable but noisy tools may benefit from improved configuration and tuning to reduce noise and enhance the precision of alerts.

Full-stack observability is still an illusion

Despite the notion that enterprise organizations are centralizing and consolidating observability with full-stack observability tools, our data shows that enterprises still have a median of 20+ tools they use to monitor on-premises and cloud infrastructure, application and digital experience monitoring.

Open-source remains low-impact at enterprise scale

Despite their popularity among developers, most open-source observability platforms and monitoring tools have yet to deliver high-value, enterprise-grade observability outcomes. Our report shows they frequently produce low-quality signals rather than actionable insights.

Purpose-built monitoring tools tend to align as either specialists or stragglers

They either fell in the top-left quadrant (optimized, high-performance tools) or the bottom-left quadrant (underutilized tools) with lower adoption and weaker signal quality. This indicates that while some purpose-built monitoring tools deliver substantial niche value, others have yet to evolve into broader observability assets.

These results highlight a clear opportunity for IT leaders: consolidate around high-performing tools, decommission low-value ones, and use enriched event data to guide smarter investments.

The Latest

Many organizations describe AI as strategic, but they do not manage it strategically. When AI plans are disconnected from strategy, detached from organizational learning, and protected from serious assumptions testing, the problem is no longer technical immaturity; it is a failure of management discipline ... Executives too often tell organizations to "use AI" before they define what AI is supposed to change. The problem deepens in organizations where strategy isn't well articulated in the first place ...

Across the enterprise technology landscape, a quiet crisis is playing out. Organizations have run hundreds, sometimes thousands, of generative AI pilots. Leadership has celebrated the proof of concept (POCs) ... Industry experience points to a sobering reality: only 5-10% of AI POCs that progress to the pilot stage successfully reach scaled production. The remaining 90% fail because the enterprise environment around them was never ready to absorb them, not the AI models ...

Today's modern systems are not what they once were. Organizations now rely on distributed systems, event-driven workflows, hybrid and multi-cloud environments and continuous delivery pipelines. While each adds flexibility, it also introduces new, often invisible failures. Development speed is no longer the primary bottleneck of innovation. Reliability is ...

Seeing is believing, or in this case, seeing is understanding, according to New Relic's 2025 Observability Forecast for Retail and eCommerce report. Retailers who want to provide exceptional customer experiences while improving IT operations efficiency are leaning on observability ... Here are five key takeaways from the report ...

Technology leaders across the federal landscape are facing, and will continue to face, an uphill battle when it comes to fortifying their digital environments against hostile and persistent threat actors. On one hand, they are being asked to push digital transformation ... On the other hand, they are facing the fiscal uncertainty of continuing resolutions (CR) and government shutdowns looming near and far. In the face of these challenges, CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs must figure out how to modernize legacy systems and infrastructure while doing more with less and still defending against external and internal threats ...

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...