Key Insights from the GigaOm Radar Report 2025

The GigaOm Radar report features a radar chart that positions vendors in quadrants such as Innovation/Platform Play and Maturity/Platform Play, categorizing them as Leaders, Challengers, or Entrants. The 2025 report has just been released, so let’s explore the findings.

SolarWinds Named a Leader and Fast Mover in Network Observability

In this year's GigaOm Radar report, SolarWinds has been named a Leader and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant. The report highlights several strengths of SolarWinds solutions:

• Dynamic discovery and mapping: SolarWinds can automatically discover and map physical and virtual topologies across different infrastructures and services, including cloud environments. The topology maps also include a "time travel" feature, allowing users to track historical changes and detect patterns. This goes beyond basic topology information from network devices and can follow the path of an application through both the internal network and ISP networks.
• Application and Layer 7 monitoring: SolarWinds provides a detailed visualization of the application stack elements, including transactions, databases, physical and virtual hosts, NAS volumes, and APIs. SolarWinds Observability offers a dashboard for distributed services and application dependency mapping.
• Container and microservices monitoring: SolarWinds allows users to track details about their container infrastructure, including hosts, host clusters, environment dependencies, and deployments. It also supports the review of metrics for containers, hosts, and other infrastructure elements, which is essential for capacity planning and analyzing container activity.

The report says that "SolarWinds is positioned as a Leader and Fast Mover in the Innovation/Platform Play quadrant of the Network Observability Radar report," making it a top choice for organizations looking to enhance their network observability.

AI and ML Are Driving the Future of Network Observability

One of the most critical trends in network observability is the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The report emphasizes that these technologies are becoming essential for vendors to remain competitive: "ML and AI are the critical elements that will dictate whether vendors remain competitive in the market." Vendors can be categorized into three groups based on their AI/ML strategies:

• AI-centric: These vendors develop AI/ML capabilities in-house or collaborate with AI specialists to embed these features within their platforms
• AI-compatible: These vendors integrate their solutions with third-party AI tools, though this approach carries the risk that these tools may not be purpose-built for network observability
• AI-reluctant: These vendors do not leverage AI and ML, focusing instead on workflow automation

The GigaOm Radar report predicts that automation, once a differentiating feature, will soon become a standard requirement. Vendors' ability to achieve this automation, particularly through AI and ML, will be a key differentiator in the market.

Dynamic Discovery and Mapping Is a Key Differentiator

While most vendors can achieve basic dynamic discovery and mapping by scheduling discovery scans, the report points out that the real value lies in more advanced features: "The widest variance in vendors’ capabilities occurs around validation and dynamic discovery and mapping." Leading solutions, like those from SolarWinds, can automatically discover and map physical and virtual topologies across different infrastructures and services, including cloud environments. Additionally, SolarWinds topology maps include a "time travel" feature, allowing users to track historical changes and detect patterns, which is invaluable for troubleshooting and performance analysis.

Visualization and Application Monitoring Are Table Stakes

Visualization has become a fundamental feature in network observability solutions, carrying forward from traditional network performance monitoring. The report states, "The most consistent capability across all vendors is visualization. This makes sense as visualization has been a focus of traditional network performance monitoring, with all developments in this area carrying forward into network observability.

The market is shifting towards a more application-centric approach. Most vendors now offer Layer 7 and application observability, reflecting the growing recognition that application performance is heavily dependent on network performance. Business leaders are increasingly aware that observability tools must provide the necessary insights to support applications via the network: “Interestingly, most vendors have gone beyond Layers 2 through 4 monitoring to provide Layer 7 and application observability as well. This illustrates a market-wide shift in priorities, by which network teams are no longer siloed but actively involved in supporting business applications.