New Relic, Splunk Among Gartner's Magic Quadrant Observability Platform Leaders

Datadog, New Relic, Elastic and Splunk are "leaders" in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms.

Gartner also named Dynatrace, Grafana Labs and Chronosphere as leaders in its trademark rankings.

For this Magic Quadrant, Gartner defines observability platforms as products that ingest operational data from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, logs, metrics, events and traces. Businesses use these to understand the health, performance and behavior of applications, services and infrastructure.

“The market that this research analyzes has been in near-constant upheaval over the last few years,” the authors wrote in their report. “It is fiercely competitive, comprises vendors that are utterly diverse in company size, operating model, origin and longevity, and includes a substantial open-source component as well. Truly, there should be something for everyone.”

Product quality and capabilities continue to advance, but so does cost, the report said.

“Gartner is starting to see significant discontent with the budgetary requirements necessary to obtain the benefits of observability, resulting in a steady stream of questions from clients along the lines of ‘is it worth it?’,” the authors wrote. “At the same time, IT operations is not immune from the AI furor that is becoming ubiquitous, and this was quite evident during this Magic Quadrant project. What should the role of AI in IT operations be?”

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Magic Quadrant Leaders

Magic Quadrant leaders are vendors that provide products that are a “strong functional match to general market requirements and those that have been among the most successful in building and expanding their customer base,” Gartner said.

“Leaders demonstrate evidence of superior vision and execution for emerging and anticipated market requirements, as well as a consistent track record of innovation and customer experience,” it said.

Among Chronosphere’s strengths, Gartner said the vendor’s control plane enables customers to analyze telemetry usage, and establish policies and rules for shaping and sampling data at ingestion time. These controls support observability cost optimization and data governance in a way that few other vendors currently can.

However, although the service is available globally, Chronosphere’s delivery platforms are hosted in U.S.-based public cloud regions only. This may pose a data sovereignty concern for some and a latency concern for others, Gartner said. A hosting presence in EMEA is planned for 2024.

Among Datadog’s strengths, Gartner said the vendor has rapidly built many new capabilities in application performance monitoring (APM), log management, digital experience monitoring (DEM), security and software delivery. It resonates well with enterprises looking for “best-of-breed” solutions.

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However, Gartner said some clients have raised concerns about spending “spiraling quickly out of control” as usage grows.

Strengths, Challenges

Among Dynatrace’s strengths, Gartner said the vendor offers a wide array of solutions for observability and security, making it "particularly attractive" for larger enterprises. This includes observability for modern architectures such as Kubernetes, containers and cloud functions, as well as monitoring for legacy enterprise solutions, such as mainframe and SAP monitoring.

However, Dynatrace primarily targets its platform to enterprises. While alternative channels such as public cloud marketplaces make it more accessible, SMBs may find that cost justification limits Dynatrace's use to monitoring the most business-critical systems.

Among Elastic’s strengths, Gartner said the vendor has embedded AI across its platform. Elastic Observability offers over 30 machine learning (ML) models, custom model integration, and an AI assistant based on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that enhances traditional AI and data analytics.

However, while its search and security products are relatively well known, awareness and adoption of Elastic Observability are lower, Gartner said. Elastic is still building sales and marketing traction for its observability offering.

Among Grafana Cloud’s strengths, Gartner said it’s hosted in 19 Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) cloud regions globally. This “impressive footprint” allows customers to choose a location based on their latency challenges and data sovereignty needs.

However, as more tools and capabilities are added to the “logs, Grafana, traces, metrics” (LGTM) stack, the more challenging it becomes to master, Gartner said.

Among New Relic’s strengths, Gartner said the vendor’s classic licensing model, based on ingestion and number of users, offers an alternative for customers discouraged by host-based licensing. Its new compute-based licensing option provides further choice by aligning cost with consumption.

However, some clients have indicated that initial setup and configuration is time consuming, especially if you are not familiar with the tool, Gartner said.

Among Splunk’s strengths, Gartner said strong support for OpenTelemetry continues to be a strength of its observability platform. The Splunk OpenTelemetry collector is supported commercially and includes distributions for Linux, Windows and Kubernetes.

But Cisco recently closed its acquisition of Splunk and rationalizing the product lines is a work in progress, Gartner said. The sales process is also uncertain, given the different go-to-market strategies employed by the two organizations.

Challengers, Visionaries, Niche Players

Gartner listed AWS and Microsoft as “challengers” in the Magic Quadrant, while Honeycomb, IBM, LogicMonitor, Logz.io and ServiceNow are listed as “visionaries.” In addition, Gartner considers BMC, Oracle and Sumo Logic to be niche players.

Gartner said the observability platforms market will continue to evolve during the next several years. Among key trends: