Smart Data: The Super Fuel Driving Next-Gen Observability

In today’s hyperconnected world, digital performance, reliability, and security are inseparable from business success. As systems grow more complex and organizations become more dependent on the flawless performance and security of vital networks, true observability is paramount. Without it, shadow IT, blind spots, and cyberattacks all hold the potential to cripple the network, negatively impacting the end-user experience and harming the overall business in the process.

These threats to the business highlight the importance of the observability ecosystem, which is a dynamic and evolving landscape of tools, platforms, and practices. Modern observability captures the internal state of the systems by analyzing output data as logs, metrics, and traces. These metrics help IT departments to accelerate development and deployment cycles. They also capture performance measurements, which are invaluable for use in improving the digital experience for internal or external customers.

However, logs, metrics, and traces have their limits. Logs record detailed events, yet offer narrow measurement. Metrics quantify trends, but lack contextual richness. Traces reveal system interactions, but often provide only partial views.

In order to help DevOps, NetOps, SecOps, and ITOps teams to collaborate more effectively in support of the business, organizations should rethink how they collect, correlate, and act on information from their networks and applications. NETSCOUT Smart Data—a multidimensional, high-fidelity dataset that transforms raw network traffic into actionable intelligence for performance monitoring, threat detection, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven analytics—is the key to achieving a better observability ecosystem.

From Packets to Insight

The foundation of Smart Data lies in NETSCOUT’s patented deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, which extracts detailed information elements from packets across the entire digital ecosystem, from on-premises data centers and co-location facilities to edge networks and multicloud environments. By analyzing the data packets themselves, Smart Data captures both quantitative measurements and qualitative dimensions, correlating the information in ways traditional observability tools cannot. Smart Data is an intelligent, curated data stream that offers a more complete and precise view of system health, performance, and user experience. By eliminating blind spots and exposing “shadow IT,” Smart Data creates a unified foundation for collaboration across development, operations, and security teams.

A New Level of Interoperability

The observability made possible with Smart Data is crucial, particularly as AI becomes deeply ingrained in the next generation of business innovations. For example, Smart Data is designed to integrate seamlessly with rapidly evolving observability ecosystems. Exported in standard formats, it can feed tools such as Splunk, Kafka, or ServiceNow, enhancing the value of data that organizations already collect.

This kind of interoperability allows Smart Data to act as the connective tissue between systems, ensuring that performance issues, outages, or bottlenecks are detected and resolved before they affect end users. In turn, this ensures that implementation of new technologies delivers the desired return on investment.

Enabling Stronger Security

While performance insight is a key advantage, Smart Data also provides tremendous value in supporting security and threat detection. When integrated into security information and event management (SIEM) tools, it adds context and precision to threat analytics.

For instance, dashboards built on Smart Data can expose unusual network behaviors that often precede or indicate malicious activity. It allows security teams to distinguish between normal variation and truly anomalous behavior. By feeding Smart Data into advanced security models, organizations can move from reactive threat response to proactive risk mitigation, which is a huge advantage in today’s high-threat world where business revenue and reputation are on the line.

Fueling Automation and AI

Smart Data supports the growing shift toward AIOps and the application of AI to IT operations. By curating information at its source, organizations can reduce data volume while maintaining relevance and context. The structured, multidimensional format makes Smart Data ideal for training analytics and machine learning models, accelerating insights and improving automation accuracy.

Its integration with platforms such as ServiceNow further extends its impact. When used with configuration management databases (CMDBs), Smart Data keeps asset inventories and service dependency maps continuously updated in real time. By creating evergreen CMDBs, it removes the need for manual data entry or periodic network scans and ensures that IT workflows remain efficient, accurate, and aligned with current network conditions.

Supercharging Observability

The rise of Smart Data signals a new era of observability. As enterprises continue to rely on interconnected digital systems, Smart Data is the “super fuel” that powers observability with intelligence and precision, enabling organizations to operate with greater agility, resilience, and foresight in the AI-driven future. It holds the key to empowering organizations to better manage complexity, optimize infrastructure, and align technical insight with business goals.

Learn How Smart Data Helps Deliver Improved Observability