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Network Observability vs. DevOps Observability

Shamus McGillicuddy

If you work in an IT organization, you've likely heard the term "observability" lately. If you're a DevOps pro, you probably know exactly what vendors are talking about when they use the term. If you're a NetOps pro, you might be scratching your head.

DevOps Knows Observability

The DevOps community is very familiar with the observability concept. It refers to the ability to understand the internal state of a system by measuring its external outputs. In DevOps, the system is the application, and the outputs are metrics, logs, and traces. DevOps pros know how to navigate messaging from application performance management and cloud monitoring vendors to find solutions that can deliver the observability they need.

More recently, network monitoring vendors have started talking about network observability. Here is where things get fuzzy. In my opinion, DevOps observability and network observability are not interchangeable. Why would they be?

DevOps teams want to understand the state of applications and the infrastructure on which they reside. NetOps teams need to understand a much larger universe of networks, from the cloud to the user edge.

Both DevOps observability and network observability refer to the need to understand the internal state of a system, but that need to understand is only a problem statement. The solution to that problem is where the differences occur.

Does Anyone Have Network Observability?

First, most NetOps teams care about application performance. They want to collect data from the application environment if they can, such as hypervisors and containers. But they don't stop there. They need to monitor data center networks, wide-area networks (WANs), and campus and branch networks. More recently, they've had to worry about home office networks.

Each network they monitor has become more complex. The data center network has been virtualized and partially extended into the public cloud. The WAN has hybridized, with a mix of managed WAN connectivity, public internet, and 4G/5G. Office networks are a mix of ethernet and Wi-Fi, connected via home internet.

A network observability system must monitor and analyze an extremely diverse and ever-growing data set to understand end-to-end network state. A NetOps team might use five, ten, or even fifty tools to monitor a network by collecting packets, flows, device logs, device metrics, test data, DNS logs, routing table changes, configuration changes, synthetic traffic, and more.

It's a lot to keep track of, and it's hard to find a single tool that can handle it all. In fact, my new research on the concept of network observability found that 83% of IT organizations are interested in streaming data from their network observability tool(s) to a central data lake. Why? Nearly half of them believe a data lake will help them correlate network data across their tools.

Earlier, I wrote that network observability is a bit "fuzzy." I'd argue that it's fuzzy because the problem of network observability is much bigger and more complex than DevOps observability. It may prove impossible for any single tool to solve this problem. That's perfectly okay. But IT organizations must keep this in mind and take a comprehensive approach to network operations tools as they steer toward the promise of network observability.

To learn more about network observability, check out EMA's November 9 webinar, which will highlight market research findings on the topic.

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Network Observability vs. DevOps Observability

Shamus McGillicuddy

If you work in an IT organization, you've likely heard the term "observability" lately. If you're a DevOps pro, you probably know exactly what vendors are talking about when they use the term. If you're a NetOps pro, you might be scratching your head.

DevOps Knows Observability

The DevOps community is very familiar with the observability concept. It refers to the ability to understand the internal state of a system by measuring its external outputs. In DevOps, the system is the application, and the outputs are metrics, logs, and traces. DevOps pros know how to navigate messaging from application performance management and cloud monitoring vendors to find solutions that can deliver the observability they need.

More recently, network monitoring vendors have started talking about network observability. Here is where things get fuzzy. In my opinion, DevOps observability and network observability are not interchangeable. Why would they be?

DevOps teams want to understand the state of applications and the infrastructure on which they reside. NetOps teams need to understand a much larger universe of networks, from the cloud to the user edge.

Both DevOps observability and network observability refer to the need to understand the internal state of a system, but that need to understand is only a problem statement. The solution to that problem is where the differences occur.

Does Anyone Have Network Observability?

First, most NetOps teams care about application performance. They want to collect data from the application environment if they can, such as hypervisors and containers. But they don't stop there. They need to monitor data center networks, wide-area networks (WANs), and campus and branch networks. More recently, they've had to worry about home office networks.

Each network they monitor has become more complex. The data center network has been virtualized and partially extended into the public cloud. The WAN has hybridized, with a mix of managed WAN connectivity, public internet, and 4G/5G. Office networks are a mix of ethernet and Wi-Fi, connected via home internet.

A network observability system must monitor and analyze an extremely diverse and ever-growing data set to understand end-to-end network state. A NetOps team might use five, ten, or even fifty tools to monitor a network by collecting packets, flows, device logs, device metrics, test data, DNS logs, routing table changes, configuration changes, synthetic traffic, and more.

It's a lot to keep track of, and it's hard to find a single tool that can handle it all. In fact, my new research on the concept of network observability found that 83% of IT organizations are interested in streaming data from their network observability tool(s) to a central data lake. Why? Nearly half of them believe a data lake will help them correlate network data across their tools.

Earlier, I wrote that network observability is a bit "fuzzy." I'd argue that it's fuzzy because the problem of network observability is much bigger and more complex than DevOps observability. It may prove impossible for any single tool to solve this problem. That's perfectly okay. But IT organizations must keep this in mind and take a comprehensive approach to network operations tools as they steer toward the promise of network observability.

To learn more about network observability, check out EMA's November 9 webinar, which will highlight market research findings on the topic.

The Latest

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 ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...