Understanding Observability
In today's complex enterprise and service provider networking environments, applications are highly distributed, infrastructures are constantly changing, user expectations continue to rise, and mission-critical services must operate reliably around the clock. However, simply knowing that a system is "up" is no longer enough. Productivity, business reputation and revenue are all at stake.
Performance management focuses on monitoring known metrics, such as bandwidth or latency, to manage known issues and user experience, answering the question, "Is the server up?" Meanwhile, network observability leverages deep, correlated data, primarily metrics, events, logs and traces but increasingly packet data as well, to identify complex, unknown problems, enabling teams to ask "Why did this employee's session from 1-2 p.m. fail across multiple services?" Observability does this by exploring system behavior and interdependencies, evolving from traditional monitoring to handle modern distributed systems.
Organizations must be able to understand why systems behave as they do in order to identify the root causes of performance degradation, and proactively prevent issues and service disruptions before they affect end users. This fundamental requirement is what drives the growing need for observability.
At its core, observability is the capability to infer a system's internal state by analyzing its external outputs. Unlike traditional monitoring, which primarily reports what is happening based on predefined metrics, observability focuses on explaining why something is happening, even in the case of previously unknown or unexpected conditions. It delivers deep, real-time visibility into complex, cloud-native and microservices-based environments, enabling organizations to maintain application reliability, performance, and a high-quality user experience.
Observability is also a critical enabler of modern IT and networking operations in the era of Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps). High-fidelity observability data supplies AIOps platforms with the context and signals needed to drive intelligent automation, accelerate issue resolution, and increasingly prevent problems before users are impacted. Because AI workflows are only as effective as the data they rely on, rich and accurate observability data directly improves the quality of AI-driven insights. At the same time, applying AI to observability itself enhances efficiency and streamlines operational workflows, resulting in more productive teams and stronger overall operational outcomes.
Why Traditional Data Alone Is Not Enough for Meaningful Observability
As networks have become increasingly complex, stretching across data centers, remote offices, co-locations and into multi-cloud environments, modern observability tools have been relied upon for actionable insights. The challenge is that observability tools relying solely on metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) lack complete visibility across the ecosphere, thereby leaving critical blind spots, making it more difficult to address problems. While MELT provides valuable insights, it has inherent limitations, particularly when it comes to providing a thorough, unbiased, and real-time view of the entire system. In short, they simply can't provide the context to reveal the why behind performance issues. Therefore, it becomes increasingly difficult to get at the root cause of network and application problems. This lack of visibility can result in costly business disruption and bottom-line impact is virtually inevitable.
The key to true comprehensive observability is to enrich MELT with context derived from packet data. Packet data is the ultimate source of truth for understanding system behavior, application performance, and user experience because every digital transaction, every interaction, and every communication traverses the network as packets, representing the actual network traffic flowing through the infrastructure. When packet data is combined with MELT, no critical events are missed, which means problems can be addressed before they escalate into outages or impact customer experience. Security, business reputation and the bottom-line are all protected.
What is Enterprise Observability?
Enterprise observability goes well beyond traditional monitoring, enabling organizations to ensure business-critical digital services operate reliably, securely, and at scale. It provides clear, actionable insight into how complex technology environments are performing and why issues occur, directly linking technology health to business outcomes.
For enterprises, moving from monitoring to observability delivers measurable value by improving application and network performance that underpin revenue, customer experience, and brand trust. Observability provides a unified, real-time view across clouds, data centers, and networks, enabling faster identification of systemic risks and performance bottlenecks before they impact customers or partners. In today’s always-on, digital universe, observability is needed to compete and gain a competitive edge.
Equally important, enterprise observability improves operational efficiency and cost control. By reducing downtime, accelerating incident resolution, and minimizing manual troubleshooting, organizations lower operational risk and maximize return on technology investments. This allows leadership to shift IT from a cost center to a performance-driven enabler of growth and resilience.
What is Network Observability?
Network observability is the ability to continuously understand how the network behaves, why it behaves that way, and how that behavior impacts business outcomes. As applications become distributed across cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, the network is the connective tissue that determines availability, customer experience, and revenue protection. When blind spots exist in the network, the risk of disruption is a constant threat.
The value of network observability lies in its ability to proactively surface risk before it becomes disruption. By correlating real-time telemetry, including packet-level data, with application and user behavior, organizations can detect performance degradation early, protect service availability, and ensure digital experiences meet business expectations. Just as importantly, observability accelerates root cause analysis, sharply reducing downtime, operational friction, and costly internal escalation cycles.
In a digital-first economy, network observability enables faster decisions, lower operational risk, stronger security posture, and consistent service delivery, directly supporting growth, customer trust, and executive decision-making.
What is Cloud Observability?
Cloud observability is the capability to gain constant, real-time insight into the performance, availability, cost, and risk of applications and infrastructure running in public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, which have become the backbone of many modern organizations. Such insights are needed to ensure cloud investments deliver agility without sacrificing reliability, security, or financial control.
As enterprises and service providers increasingly operate across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, visibility limited to on-premises systems creates blind spots that elevate operational and financial risk. True observability unifies cloud and on-prem environments into a single, correlated view, allowing leadership to understand how cloud services, networks, and applications interact to support critical business outcomes.
With cloud observability, organizations can proactively detect performance issues, prevent service outages, control cloud spend, and enforce service-level objectives that protect customer experience and revenue. Most importantly, it enables organizations to govern complex cloud ecosystems with confidence, ensuring resilience, accountability, and measurable return on cloud investments.
What Is Application Observability?
Application observability is the ability to understand how business-critical applications perform, why performance issues occur, and how those issues impact customers, revenue, and productivity. Armed with these insights, organizations are better able to ensure that applications consistently deliver the digital experiences the business depends on. While network visibility remains essential, application performance is where service quality, customer satisfaction, and brand trust are ultimately determined.
Modern applications generate enormous data volumes, increasing both operational complexity and observability costs. Advanced approaches enrich existing network data using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to enrich MELT without relying on sampling. DE-MELT is a revolutionary leap beyond traditional MELT data sets, significantly enriching the depth and quality of data insights. DE-MELT delivers high-fidelity, end-to-end insight while avoiding the expense of collecting, storing, and managing excessive raw data.
The result is clearer accountability, faster issue resolution, predictable costs, and application-level intelligence that supports resilient operations and confident executive decision-making.
How NETSCOUT Helps
Nearly every enterprise or service provider on the planet relies on the network to do business every day. Any gaps in observability can impede IT's ability to keep networks, applications and services operating efficiently to support the business. NETSCOUT's innovative solutions deliver vendor agnostic observability that overcomes blind spot challenges. With a range of instrumentation choices supporting any infrastructure, any application, for any user anywhere, organizations can develop a trusted observability strategy to meet their performance needs of today and their automation and AI needs of tomorrow.
NETSCOUT's nGenius® solutions for observability offer an advanced approach to observability based on unique Smart Data technology. Smart Data, based on unique metadata and intelligent insights, enhances MELT to allow organizations to see what's truly happening in real-time. This higher-level of observability assures robust digital service performance, availability, and user experience.
Our unique data and insights fuel top business priorities for success and growth. NETSCOUT's borderless visibility and scalable architecture empowers enterprises and service providers to improve user experience, ensure mission-critical applications, leverage the full value of AI, and enable product and service optimization.
Leveraging better data for network insights can lead to better outcomes and user experiences. NETSCOUT observability solutions provide these powerful insights to improve digital experiences while integrating with nearly any AIOps or observability solution on the market. NETSCOUT offers visibility that empowers businesses to thrive.