Alexis Kestler
Hello friend! If you manage complex cloud-native applications, you need full-stack monitoring to keep things running smoothly. Traditional siloed monitoring tools can‘t provide the unified visibility needed for modern dynamic environments.
In this guide, I‘ll explain what full-stack monitoring entails and review 5 top solutions on the market. My goal is to help you evaluate options based on your needs as an application manager, developer, or IT operations professional. Let‘s get started!
What is Full-Stack Monitoring and Why It‘s Crucial
Full-stack monitoring gives you a single pane of glass for complete visibility across your entire environment:
- Application performance and user experience
- Infrastructure health (containers, VMs, hosts, cloud resources)
- Network traffic flow between components
- Application logs and events
Consolidating all this data delivers powerful benefits:
- Accelerates troubleshooting by connecting cross-domain insights
- Reduces mean time to resolution for application issues
- Cuts costs by eliminating multiple monitoring tools
- Enables shared visibility for cross-functional teams
According to a Splunk survey, 66% of organizations use 6+ monitoring tools on average. But this siloed approach strains budgets and makes problems harder to pinpoint across domains.
Full-stack monitoring platforms like Datadog, Dynatrace and Cisco AppDynamics promise to solve these challenges. Gartner predicts worldwide spend on these consolidated solutions will reach $7.5 billion by 2024.
Clearly, more IT leaders now recognize the value of unified monitoring and observability. Next let‘s look at top vendors in this space.
Zenoss: AI-Driven Hybrid Infrastructure Monitoring
Zenoss is tailored for large enterprises with complex on-premises and legacy infrastructure.
Key capabilities:
- Uses AI to detect anomalies and perform root cause analysis
- Creates a unified timeline of app/infrastructure status
- Automates event management to reduce alert noise
- Discovers component relationships and dependencies
Over 200 Zenoss employees hold 700+ software certifications, reflecting deep monitoring expertise.
Zenoss really shines for intelligent AIOps capabilities. Its patented analytics can predict problems before they occur and instantly diagnose root causes when issues arise.
For example, Zenoss reduced mean time to resolution by 85% for a major US insurance provider by automatically pinpointing the source of performance problems.
So if you must maximize reliability of business-critical legacy systems, Zenoss is a strong contender.
Sematext: Optimized for Dynamic Container Environments
Sematext is purpose-built for containerized and cloud-native infrastructure.
Key features:
- Auto-discovers containers, hosts, pods in Kubernetes
- Unified logs, metrics, events, tracing spans
- Anomaly detection, alerting, fast correlation
- ELK stack integration built-in
Sematext provides visibility into container resource usage, network traffic, infrastructure metrics, and application logs/events.
It‘s ideal for modern environments like Kubernetes where resources change frequently. The automatic discovery mechanisms track these dynamic elements without requiring manual configuration.
Sematext container monitoring capabilities shine here. For example, it enabled a major financial services company to cut issue resolution time in half for their Kubernetes infrastructure.
So if you need unified observability across DevOps pipelines and cloud-native apps, consider Sematext.
Dynatrace: AI-Assisted Full Stack Observability
Dynatrace offers an AI-powered solution for smarter monitoring.
Key capabilities:
- Smartscape auto-maps app topology and dependencies
- Davis AI engine detects performance anomalies
- Code-level visibility for end-to-end transactions
- Works across multi-cloud, hybrid environments
Dynatrace sets itself apart with AI assistive technology. The Davis agent ingests metrics, events, and logs from across the full stack. It automatically baselines application behavior to find anomalies using AI algorithms.
When performance problems or outages occur, Davis performs triage to pinpoint root causes. It scans across all layers to understand how degradations propagate between components. This reduces mean time to detection and resolution.
Dynatrace customer Jaguar Land Rover improved anomaly detection by 73% compared to traditional monitoring tools. Davis AI also cut incident volumes by over 90% through noise reduction.
If leveraging AI to speed up monitoring and observability appeals to you, Dynatrace is a top contender.
New Relic: Unified Insights for Mobile and Browser Apps
New Relic offers a SaaS monitoring solution focused on digital user experiences.
Key capabilities:
- Unified visibility for mobile, browser, apps, servers
- Distributed tracing across services
- Applied intelligence for anomaly detection
- Integrated log management and analysis
A key strength of New Relic lies in browser and mobile application monitoring. It enables companies to optimize web and mobile UX with detailed performance insights.
For example, New Relic helped 24 Hour Fitness improve mobile app ratings by 4.5 stars through user experience monitoring and optimization.
Another notable capability is applied intelligence for setting dynamic alert thresholds and detecting anomalies. This reduces false positives that waste time.
So if your priority is monitoring mobile, web, and digital user interactions, New Relic is a strong option to consider.
Sysdig: Open Source Metrics Monitoring at Scale
Sysdig offers Kubernetes and container monitoring with full Prometheus ecosystem compatibility.
Key capabilities:
- Unified visibility from containers to infrastructure
- Leverages open-source Prometheus for metrics
- Auto-discovers Kubernetes objects
- PromQL support for powerful custom metrics queries
- Call tracing for microservices observability
Sysdig is built for cloud-scale environments where performance matters. It uses an agentless approach with negligible overhead compared to alternatives.
Sysdig also interoperates completely with tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and PromQL. So you can get enriched Kubernetes monitoring without sacrificing your existing investment in open-source observability.
For example, Sysdig helped a financial services company consolidate 50+ Prometheus instances into a single Sysdig backend. This simplified management while delivering a 13% improvement in observability.
If you want to scale open-source metrics monitoring across complex Kubernetes deployments, Sysdig is a compelling option.
Which Full-Stack Monitoring Solution is Right For You?
With the power of unified full-stack observability, you can maximize application uptime and deliver better customer experiences.
When evaluating solutions, focus on your primary use cases and requirements:
- If legacy/on-prem infrastructure is critical, consider Zenoss for AIOps and automation.
- For containerized apps and microservices, Sematext and Sysdig are purpose-built options.
- Dynatrace offers industry-leading AI assistance for observability.
- If mobile/web UX is key, New Relic provides specialized capabilities.
I hope this overview provides useful insights as you seek the ideal consolidated monitoring platform for your needs. Please reach out if you have any other questions! I‘m always happy to help compare options and make recommendations.
