This document provides a competitive analysis of the observability market by: 1) Defining observability and outlining the fragmented landscape across applications, infrastructure, and network monitoring vendors. 2) Categorizing competitors as tier 1, 2, or 3 priorities and analyzing data points and Cisco's field perspective. 3) Assessing that while the term "observability" is marketed broadly, competitors differ in their ability to provide full-stack observability and insights beyond siloed monitoring. Legacy vendors are transforming to cloud offerings, and acquisitions are expanding solutions.

1. For internal use only. Not for external use or consumption.
Gavin Lloyd
Hybrid Cloud and Observability Analyst CI
Aug 2021
DC & Hybrid Cloud, Observability
Competitive Analysis

2. © 2021 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential For internal use only. Not for external use or consumption.
• The purpose of this document is to define the competitive landscape
within Observability.
• The document is informed by many sources outlined in the infographic
(right)
Purpose & Inputs
Categorised Competitors
Tier 1 - Priority, Tier 2 –
Watch, Tier 3 – Emerging
Opinion
Analysis of data
points & view of
Cisco Field
Internal
SFDC, CWR,
Geo leads
External
Analyst reports
(Gartner, IDC),
Market share,
TAM
Observability
Defined as any vendor that can provide visibility & insights into Apps, infrastructure or Network *
Provide performance and security contextual insights into applications and infrastructure whilst
continue to Optimize the infrastructure
Gartner Defines Observability as ”the evolution of
monitoring into a process that offers insight into digital
business applications, speeds innovation, and enhances
customer experience.”

3. © 2021 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential For internal use only. Not for external use or consumption.
Observability Competitive Landscape
The playing field is more fragmented and siloed than ever before
APPLICATION INFRASTRUCTURE
NETWORK

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Top Network Competitors Top Application Competitors
Top Infrastructure
Competitors
Top FSO Competitors
Current industry analyst perspectives are siloed; i.e. Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) are
converging into Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) which is the direction of Optimizing the Application Experience (OAE).
Competitive Landscape Overview
Competitive Assessment
The term, “observability” is undergoing an industry marketing blitz where it’s either misused, stretched, or disputed in definition. This is a stopgap as
competitors are starting to differentiate themselves by investing beyond siloed use-case monitoring to full-stack observability and eventually to Digital
Experience Monitoring while legacy competitors like VMware, BMC, and SolarWinds are transforming to Cloud SaaS players.
Other vendors are acquiring in the observability market to provide a rounded solution, some of these like Splunk and ServiceNow have large
customer basis and represent an emerging risk to Cisco
Observability Market Assessment
Understanding the market, the solution siloes, and who you’re likely to run into

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Cisco Observability winning take-aways
Understanding the market leading investments that Cisco has executed on
Three highlights for competitive differentiation
Lead with the used cases above and make them relevant to your
customers. Get a hook and lead with a demo highlighting integrations.
Understand your customer digital maturity and the challenges they are
likely experiencing
Evaluate the conversation to observability with business context, don’t
fight on a tooling conversation.
NetOps
DevOps &
AppOps
SecOps
InfraOps
Application Security
Hybrid Application
Monitoring
Modern (Cloud Native)
Application Monitoring
Application Resource
Optimization
Hybrid Cost Optimization
Customer Digital Experience
Monitoring
Application Dependency
Monitoring
Performance Optimization Security
Competition
There is a vast amount of competitors in this space which is changing very
quickly.
Understand there is a difference between Visibility / Monitoring and
Observability / Insights. A lot of competitors are focused on visibility at the
moment which is easy, the hard part is the insights derived from the visibility
If we look at the used cases we have the most complete solution as are
competitors all have gaps.

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Cisco Sales additional resources
Get additional resources and help
Full-StackObservability Learning Map
http://go2.cisco.com/fso-learning-map
AppDynamicsCompetitive Portal
http://go2.cisco.com/appdynamics-competitive
Sales ConnectCompetitive Portal
http://go2.cisco.com/competitive-intelligence
Get help from theCompetitiveWar Room
http://cwr.cisco.com/