2020 Gartner Market Guide for NPMD

UPDATE: In spring 2020, Gartner officially sunsetted the annual Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics in favor of the Market Guide detailed in this post.

Over the past several years, network monitoring has gotten a lot trickier. Network packets are becoming increasingly difficult to collect, according to the Gartner Market Guide for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD).

Cloud-native architectures are replacing hub-and-spoke network designs rapidly. Gone are the days when IT Ops and SecOps could simply leverage traditional network monitoring stacks to monitor traffic. Cloud speed, scale, and dynamism have put us in the middle of an information architecture revolution nearly as dramatic as the Tesla Model Y replacing the horse-and-buggy.

Cloud migration requires new tools to monitor the visibility and flow of network traffic. As powerful data center hardware appliances are increasingly replaced by cloud-hosted applications and infrastructure, different types of network performance monitoring (NPM) solutions needed to ingest and analyze network packet traffic.

In their recently released Market Guide for NPMD, Gartner details today's solutions and speaks to the future of the category. In particular, we think there's hope in collaboration between Network Operations and Security Operations teams, which share a common need to analyze network traffic.

The Market Guide also includes a list of Representative Vendors, including ExtraHop. Having been named a Leader in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics, ExtraHop believes our inclusion reflects our continued commitment to uniting IT and Security professionals with the complete visibility, and intelligent response they need to secure their hybrid and cloud enterprises from the inside out.

Read below for some quotes from the Gartner Market Guide for NPMD.

"Increase alignment between network operations and security operations, by coordinating NPMD procurement decisions with security analytics solutions, including network traffic analytics tools."

Today, companies rely on a well-performing and agile network, and of course, a network that's secure. Through this lens, the goals of network operations are increasingly aligned with security operations: they both rely on objective network traffic data, and can benefit by combining their monitoring efforts on a single platform, specifically network detection and response (NDR) tools.

As both teams juggle increasing complexity and data silos, a holistic, transparent, and unifying solution is required. To get ahead of sophisticated threats, it is imperative that both Network Operations Center and Security Operations Center departments consolidate tools in order to be a unified front.

"Future-proof network monitoring by investing in network performance monitoring and diagnostics tools that provide the required level of visibility in hybrid environments, including edge network and cloud network monitoring."

According to the Gartner Market Guide for NPMD, "by 2024, 50% of network operations teams will be required to re-architect their network monitoring stack, due to the impact of hybrid networking."

As more users migrate to public, private, or natively-built clouds, applications are accessed from almost anywhere, and devices are connected to a network no longer bound by traditional endpoints. With more mobile, IoT, and operational technology (OT) endpoints connecting to the network, it's clear that the changing nature of the edge calls for new security and performance monitoring solutions in the hybrid cloud.

"There has been increased interest in the cybersecurity-focused network traffic analytics (NTA) market, which uses similar packet data for threat analytics (see "Market Guide for Network Traffic Analysis")."

NDR products use network traffic analysis (NTA) to fill in gaps left by other security technologies in four key areas: rapid investigation, intelligent response, internal visibility, and threat detection. According to the Gartner Market Guide, "the changing nature of security threats resulting from insider attacks has spiked this interest, and this market is composed of several NPMD vendors, who've made the switch."

ExtraHop Reveal(x) for IT Ops builds on our years of experience in the NPMD space in order to provide real-time visibility across on-premises, cloud, and multi-cloud architectures, with advanced machine learning to detect and contextualize threats and performance issues up to 95 percent faster than other solutions while reducing time-to-resolve by 60 percent. Learn more about Reveal(x) for IT Ops here.

Gartner clients can access the full report here.

Gartner, Market Guide for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics, Josh Chessman, 5 March 2020

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics, 7 February 2019, Sanjit Ganguli, Ted Corbett

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