
Today’s computer networks are often highly complex digital channels that carry data and communications that power markets, trade, and digital commerce. Failure in the form of network disruption or poor bandwidth has always been unacceptable to every network user, but it is also not uncommon. Until recently, network carriers and large enterprises could sustain uptime by relying on network monitoring tools that collect and analyze device metrics. But as networks have grown in complexity and become more widely distributed in recent years—due to the rise of cloud computing, software-defined networks, hybrid work, data analytics, and, more recently, artificial intelligence (AI)—a new generation of network observability tools has demonstrated its superiority at managing this complexity.