Top 4 monitoring and observability tool trends

The data shows key trends and insights for purpose-built monitoring tools and observability platforms.

No tool wholly owns the top-right quadrant—the observability landscape remains fragmented with no clear leader.

• While tools like New Relic and SolarWinds come closest, there are no clear leaders that combine both widespread usage and consistently high actionability (top-right quadrant).
• This signals that even the strongest platforms have room to grow, and the observability industry is still evolving toward optimal performance at scale.

Open-source tools remain low-impact with limited adoption.

• Open-source tools such as Prometheus and Grafana (dark blue) and Nagios and Zabbix (dark yellow) appear in the lower-left or lower-right quadrants with smaller bubbles and lower signal quality.
• Despite their popularity among developers, most open-source observability platforms and monitoring tools have yet to deliver high-value, enterprise-grade observability outcomes.

Some high-coverage tools fall short on signal quality.

• Tools in the bottom-right quadrant contributed a large share of incidents, indicated by their position far along the coverage axis and their sizable bubble sizes, representing broad adoption.
• However, their lower actionability highlights 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.

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

• Purpose-built monitoring tools either fell in the top-left quadrant (optimized, high-performance tools), like PRTG and SolarWinds Pingdom, 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.

For organizations investing in observability, the challenge is identifying which tools deserve broader deployment and which require refinement or reevaluation.