AI 'Observability' Becomes Rapidly Growing Tech Market Trend

Much of the growth in this market has been ignited by artificial intelligence

"Observability" -- while perhaps not quite as sexy a term as "AI" -- is fast becoming a tech buzzword du jour of industry PR and marketing firms promoting various software platforms and solutions.

There's a good reason for that. The observability market is one that is rapidly and significantly growing, according to several industry reports, with much of that growth ignited by artificial intelligence.

Defining 'Observability'

Let's face it, "observability" is a rather broad term. Gartner defines observability solutions as "software that enables the observation and analysis of application health, performance and user experience," according to its July 2023 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring and Observability report (which can be downloaded here).

According to Gitnux, observability is "the ability to monitor and understand the internal state and behavior of complex systems through data collection and analysis."

Observability isn't "a single technology" or one defined market, according to Gartner. Instead, it spans across many different business operations. Observability can be applied to monitoring cloud infrastructures, endpoints, data, application behavior and more.

Companies that implement observability technology will gain a competitive business advantage; Gartner predicts.

The observability market is expected to grow significantly and rapidly. Gitnux predicts that by 2025, the global market size will reach $2.3B.

Observability and AI

Add artificial intelligence into the mix, and the market size predictions grow substantially.

One report forecasts the observability market to grow from $2.4B in 2023 to $4.1B by 2028, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 11.7%, with much of that growth attributed to the burgeoning ubiquity of advanced technologies like AI, machine learning, and real-time data analytics. Gartner predicts a $9B AI observability market.

Gartner names major companies in this market in its Magic Quadrant of leading application performance monitoring and observability platforms.

There are the usual big players in the space like Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Broadcom. Many of these solutions are more targeted to large enterprises.

However, the Magic Quadrant pinpoints vendors who focus on the midmarket including Riverbed, Splunk, ManageEngine and New Relic.

All these vendors have added some AI capability to their platforms within the last year. In July 2023, ManageEngine announced it had added OpenAI observability to its Site24x7 cloud-based observability platform.

Splunk announced new AI features in its "unified security and observability platform," also last year, CRN reported.

This month, New Relic launched Grok, a generative AI observability assistant.

Earlier this month, Riverbed announced its open, AI-powered observability platform "aimed at filling in the blind spots that exist in complex IT environments that include public cloud and remote work environments, as well as Zero Trust and SD-WAN architectures," according to CRN.

With advanced technologies like AI, platforms like observability, which may once have been considered solutions for large enterprises, are becoming more affordable and accessible for midsized organizations. As Alex Thurber, SVP Global Partners and Alliances at Riverbed told MES Computing in a statement:

"IT leaders at all sizes of organizations, including mid-market enterprises, are looking to observability solutions as they face immense challenges including complex IT environments, staffing shortages, heightened user expectations, and operational costs. Riverbed is seeking to reduce these burdens on CIOs and IT leaders by providing an AI-powered observability platform and solutions that help customers move from reactive to proactive to predictive in their remediation. Our collection of full fidelity data and AIOps solutions are giving IT leaders the tools necessary to remediate network issues faster, often without human intervention. With more than 20 years of industry experience, Riverbed at its core is focused on helping organizations improve their overall digital experience by using AI automation for the prevention, identification, and resolution of IT issues."