The growing complexity of modern digital infrastructure demands a smarter observability strategy. As businesses expand their use of cloud, software-as-a-service, content delivery networks and globally distributed networks, ensuring performance, uptime and reliability is becoming more challenging — and more essential — than ever, according to theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty.

In today’s enterprise environments, tool consolidation is often viewed as a path to cost savings and operational simplicity. However, this simplification can come at the cost of visibility. A new industry analysis reveals how traditional observability approaches fall short in the age of distributed systems, and why internet performance monitoring is emerging as a critical complement to application performance monitoring, according to Nashawaty.

“While consolidation is often necessary, oversimplifying observability can result in critical blind spots, especially in the internet layer, which underpins all IP-based communication between cloud, user, and service endpoints,” he said.

Why observability strategy must expand to include the internet layer

As IT budgets tighten, 59% of organizations plan to consolidate their observability tools by 2025, Nashawaty noted. Most cite cost savings and platform unification as key motivators. Yet, this push to reduce complexity often exposes organizations to increased risk, particularly from outages outside the application stack.

“Despite the fact that more than 60% of significant outages in the previous year came from sources other than the application stack, data indicates that 72% of IT decision-makers do not have visibility into dependencies outside of their own infrastructure, such as SaaS providers, CDNs, [domain name systems] and [internet service providers]”, Nashawaty explained.

This lack of external visibility results in missed incidents, delayed responses and ultimately, degraded customer experiences. In fact, 44% of teams that consolidated tools reported an increase in mean time to resolution, especially for network-related issues, according to Nashawaty.

“Sixty-eight percent experienced at least one critical incident that was not detected or diagnosed quickly due to monitoring blind spots,” he noted.

IPM as the missing piece in modern observability

Internet performance monitoring addresses these blind spots by focusing on the health of the internet as a delivery mechanism. This includes monitoring DNS, CDN performance, SaaS availability and ISP routing issues from real-world endpoints across the globe. Unlike traditional APM tools, IPM provides a multi-dimensional view of how users actually experience services, according to Nashawaty.

“Catchpoint Systems Inc. is a pioneer in this space,” he said. “Its Internet Performance Monitoring software provides multi-dimensional, correlated views of the health of digital services by combining synthetics, real user monitoring, DNS, [border gateway protocol] and endpoint telemetry.”

The result is better root-cause analysis and reduced user-facing downtime, Nashawaty noted.. IPM platforms such as Catchpoint help organizations maintain visibility even as they reduce tool sprawl, enabling a best-of-breed approach that combines internal telemetry with external performance data.

“According to theCUBE Research, 58% of the organizations that stopped using external synthetic testing tools later came to regret their choice, especially after preventable outages,” Nashawaty said.

Take the next step: Build a resilient observability strategy

To stay competitive in today’s fast-moving digital landscape, observability must go beyond application metrics and server logs. Organizations need full-stack visibility that includes the complex, external systems users rely on every day. That’s where Catchpoint’s approach stands out, by addressing internet-layer blind spots, reducing time-to-resolution and helping teams proactively detect issues before customers are impacted, Nashawaty explained.

Catchpoint’s report makes it clear: The future of observability requires a strategic balance between consolidation and coverage. Integrating internet performance monitoring into your observability strategy can help safeguard user experience, reduce costly downtime, and future-proof your digital operations, according to Nashawaty.

Read the full Catchpoint report, How to Avoid Critical Mistakes in Observability Strategy, to explore how leading enterprises are building resilient, high-visibility architectures in the age of cloud, SaaS, and global connectivity.

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