EMA Network Observability: Managing Performance Across Hybrid Networks

Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has published its 2025 “Network Observability: Managing Performance Across Hybrid Networks” report with a focus on how the network observability market has evolved. The industry has undergone a transformation from leveraging network monitoring or network performance management tools to depending on network observability solutions with several critical capabilities to manage network performance, availability, capacity, cost, and compliance of an enterprise network.

Of the more than 350 IT professionals that participated in this year’s study, 66.7 percent were in North America and 33.3 percent were in Europe (U.K., France, and Germany), and approximately 77 percent came from companies that employed more than 2,500 employees (59.2 percent had between 2,500 and 9,999, and 17.7 percent had more than 1,000). More than 75 percent of the participants were middle and upper management (24.5 percent IT executives—VPs, CTOs, and CIOs—and 52.2 percent were IT directors/managers/supervisors).

This 2025 study is new research that updates and expands some of EMA’s previous materials related to network observability in the 2022 market research report “Network Observability: Delivering Actionable Insights to Network Operations.” In addition to the survey, EMA Research Vice President Shamus McGillicuddy also engaged in in-depth interviews with several network engineers and architects with expertise in their own company’s network observability tools to provide breadth and color to the research throughout the report.
This 2025 report validates several common themes, including the fact that network observability has become mainstream and most of the survey respondents (94.9 percent) believe the term itself is useful for describing tools they have used to understand and manage the health and performance of their network.

With the number of headlines in 2024 tied to technology-related disruptions from both performance and security issues, it is no wonder that interest is on the rise for network observability. The ripple effects from these outages can be significant and far-reaching. A single outage in one corporate network can leave its customers experiencing lost revenue, employee overtime costs, expensive repairs, and their own customers’ dissatisfaction, to name just a few real-dollar impacts. And the company that has the outage can find itself facing public embarrassment, loss of confidence, and reputational damage as a result. Each incident is different, and the outcomes and impacts vary, but the damage is real in each case.

Learn more about how an IT organization can evaluate and choose a network observability solution for managing the performance, availability, capacity, cost, and compliance of its enterprise network in the EMA research summary report  “Network Observability: Managing Performance Across Hybrid Networks.”