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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

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...