Network management has never been easy, and the proliferation of IoT devices, the shift to remote work, and the migration of applications to multi-cloud environments have added new levels of complexity to enterprise networks.

IT execs are dealing with network management tool sprawl and employee skills gaps. They are also struggling to gain visibility across increasingly distributed networks, including SaaS instances that are not under their direct control.

Even the terminology is evolving. Terms like network monitoring or network management are being replaced with buzzwords like network observability or unified observability, according to a exact report from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA.)

Whatever wording is used to describe modern network management, there is agreement on what such a platform should include. On the basic networking level, the system needs to have the capability to ingest data from logs, traces, events and other metrics in order to troubleshoot problems, prevent outages from occurring in the future, and optimize network performance through automation.

Moving up the stack, management platforms should also provide application performance management (APM), and insight into the customer/user experience, known as digital experience management (DEM). Observability platforms are also extending into DevOps (NetDevOps), they share data with security teams for incident response and vulnerability management, and they leverage artificial intelligence (AIOps).

A single platform that does it all probably doesn’t exist. But we’ve identified 10 leading vendors that are working hard to get there. This subjective list is weighted heavily in favor of vendors with broad platforms, rather than point products, and with vendors that have demonstrated an intention to aggressively expand their portfolio of capabilities rather than stand pat in a particular niche.