Overview
AI-Driven Observability Requires Optimal Viable Telemetry
Observability is foundational to the modern enterprise, yet too often fails to deliver the outcomes it promises. Why? Because the volume of metrics, events, logs and traces has surged as environments grow more distributed and complex, driving costs skyward. But attempts to control costs by reducing data have also reduced context, keeping teams trapped in reactive alert cycles instead of enabling proactive operations and AI-driven automation.
A new approach is required. One that goes beyond traditional MELT data to reduce cost and risk simultaneously while elevating the quality of data to power increasingly autonomous operations.
That approach is Optimal Viable Telemetry — the minimum data required to deliver maximum operational impact at enterprise and carrier scale.
Today’s Challenges
Unsustainable Data Growth
The volumes of traditional MELT data are increasing faster than budgets, fueled by microservices, containers, multi-cloud, and AI-driven operations.
Cost vs. Context Tradeoffs
Downsampling and tiering reduce spend but strip away the fidelity needed for accurate diagnosis and predictive insight.
Reactive Operations
Sampled and synthetic MELT data often detects symptoms after impact, keeping teams in alert-driven response mode.
Incomplete Visibility
Traditional MELT cannot deliver a true, real-time view of user experience and service behavior no matter how much data is stored.
$336,000
per hour average cost of unplanned downtime for large enterprise1
84%
of users struggle with the cost and complexity of monitoring 2
5%
proportion of applications enterprises can afford to monitor 3
30%
of observability data is captured in duplicate4
1: Gartner
2: Gartner
3. Forrester
4. IDC, Getting Data Collection Volume Right Is the Top Observability Challenge, doc #US51363123, November 2023
Our Approach
Observability Built on Truth
Unlike traditional MELT approaches, the NETSCOUT Data Platform analyzes all operational activity as it traverses the network in real time, at wire speed, and in context. It transforms this comprehensive view into enriched, structured Smart Data that reflects how services, applications, and user experiences are performing across your entire digital ecosystem. It’s a high-fidelity, real-time foundation for AI-powered observability.
Because analytics are generated at the source of data capture, only high-value signal moves upstream into observability and AIOps platforms. Not raw packets. Not redundant logs. Not unstructured noise. The result is a complete operational view delivered through a curated, cost-efficient data feed to NETSCOUT’s observability applications and across our partner ecosystem.
This is what optimal viable telemetry looks like in practice: complete visibility, economic efficiency, and the contextual truth required for reactive troubleshooting, proactive performance management, and AI-driven predictive operations at enterprise scale.
Observability Deep Dive
Explore the capabilities of NETSCOUT Smart Data for delivering unparalleled security and observability insights.
Outcomes That Matter
Drive Smarter Operations at Lower Cost and Risk
Lower Observability Costs Without Sacrificing Insight
Reduce ingestion and storage overhead by passing enriched signal, not raw data, into observability platforms, preserving context while controlling spend.
Move from Reactive to Proactive Operations
Gain real-time, ground-truth visibility across services and user experience, enabling teams to detect and resolve degradation before it becomes an outage.
Improve Signal Quality for AIOps and Automation
Provide AI-driven operations with complete, unsampled data to enable more accurate correlation, fewer false positives, and smarter automated decisions.
Reduce Operational Risk at Enterprise Scale
Establish a trusted data foundation that spans cloud, data center, and hybrid environments, ensuring consistent visibility as complexity grows.
Why NETSCOUT
The Data That Reveals What Others Miss
Smart Data transforms complex traffic into high-fidelity, actionable intelligence. By extracting full-context metadata from every packet, it delivers curated, time series datasets purpose-built for modern observability and automation workflows.
This precision enables IT and cybersecurity teams to quickly understand what’s happening, resolve issues faster, and elevate digital experiences across the entire ecosystem.
Hover over the figure to see what you’ve been missing.
Configuration Management Visibility Without Smart Data
Configuration Management Visibility With Smart Data
Built to Work with Your Observability Ecosystem
Designed to complement and enhance your existing observability and IT operations platforms, adding authoritative network context that strengthens analytics, accelerates incident response, and improves cross-team collaboration.
By enriching observability, ITSM, and analytics platforms with network truth, NETSCOUT helps organizations get more value from the tools they already rely on.
Trusted by industry leaders worldwide
Use Cases
How NETSCOUT Helps
Resources
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
How is NETSCOUT’s observability solution different from traditional monitoring tools?
NETSCOUT observes real network traffic at the packet level, rather than relying only on sampled metrics or synthetic data. This provides a trusted, end-to-end view of service performance across the network, cloud, and edge, so teams can see exactly what is happening, where it is happening, and which services or customers are impacted. The result is faster root cause analysis, fewer blind spots, less security risks and more confident operational decisions.
Can NETSCOUT work alongside our existing tools and platforms?
Yes. NETSCOUT is designed to integrate into existing operational ecosystems, not replace them.
It connects with OSS, ITSM, NOC, SOC, analytics, and automation platforms through open APIs and standard interfaces. NETSCOUT enriches these systems with high-fidelity network intelligence, helping teams improve triage, accelerate resolution, and automate safely, without disrupting current workflows.
How does NETSCOUT observability support network security and threat detection?
NETSCOUT provides continuous, real-time visibility into network traffic behavior, helping security teams detect threats that other tools can miss.
By analyzing traffic patterns, even in encrypted environments, NETSCOUT supports early detection of DDoS attacks, abnormal behavior, and volumetric threats across the network. This shared visibility between NOC and SOC enables faster response, better coordination, and reduced risks to services, customers, and revenue.
How does observability with NETSCOUT reduce operational risk?
By delivering continuous, end-to-end visibility, NETSCOUT helps teams detect issues early, validate automated actions, and prevent surprises.
Operations teams can see emerging performance risks before customers are impacted, confirm root cause with certainty, and coordinate across teams using a single source of truth, reducing outages, SLA violations, and unnecessary escalations
