By the close of 2019, IT infrastructure monitoring had become a critical discipline for organizations managing increasingly complex hybrid environments. Whether teams were running on-premises data centers, cloud-hosted workloads, or a mix of both, the ability to observe system health, detect anomalies, and respond quickly had moved from a nice-to-have to a fundamental operational requirement.
This article examines the state of the IT infrastructure monitoring market as it stood in 2019, covering the dominant vendors, deployment models, key verticals, and the forces shaping adoption—without relying on unverifiable market figures.
Why IT Infrastructure Monitoring Matters
IT infrastructure monitoring refers to the continuous collection, analysis, and alerting on metrics and events generated by servers, networks, storage, applications, and cloud services. The goal is to maintain visibility across the full stack so that engineering and operations teams can identify performance degradation or outages before they affect users.
As workloads became more distributed in the late 2010s—driven by containerization, microservices, and cloud migration—point-in-time monitoring gave way to real-time observability pipelines capable of ingesting telemetry at scale. This shift substantially expanded the market and drove competitive differentiation among vendors.
Leading Vendors in 2019
The infrastructure monitoring space in 2019 was competitive, with both established enterprise vendors and newer cloud-native platforms vying for market share. Key players included:
- CA Technologies (now Broadcom) – Offered enterprise-grade APM and infrastructure monitoring, particularly strong in large legacy environments. CA was acquired by Broadcom in 2018, shifting its go-to-market focus toward large enterprise accounts.
- Splunk – Known primarily for log management and SIEM, Splunk expanded into infrastructure metrics and IT operations intelligence, enabling correlation of log data with performance telemetry.
- Nagios Enterprises – One of the oldest names in monitoring, Nagios provided open-source and commercial products for host and service checking. Popular in smaller teams and organizations with strong sysadmin cultures.
- AppDynamics (Cisco) – Focused on application performance monitoring with business transaction tracing, code-level diagnostics, and infrastructure visibility. Acquired by Cisco in 2017.
- ScienceLogic – Targeted hybrid IT environments with a topology-aware platform that linked infrastructure components to services and business outcomes.
- Datadog – By 2019, Datadog had grown rapidly as a cloud-native SaaS monitoring platform, integrating metrics, traces, and logs in a single interface. Particularly popular with DevOps and engineering teams.
- SevOne – Specialized in high-scale network and infrastructure performance management, serving large enterprises and service providers.
- PagerDuty – Primarily an incident response and alerting platform, PagerDuty integrated with monitoring tools to route and escalate alerts to the right on-call responders.
- Zabbix – Open-source infrastructure monitoring with a broad community following. Offered agent-based and agentless monitoring for servers, networks, and applications.
- Spiceworks – Served the SMB segment with free network monitoring and IT help desk tools, funded by advertising.
Deployment Models: On-Premises vs. Cloud-Hosted
In 2019, most enterprise monitoring platforms were available in two primary deployment models:
- On-premises – The monitoring platform runs within the organization’s own data center. This model suits industries with strict data residency requirements, such as government, defense, and regulated financial services. It typically requires more internal operational overhead to maintain.
- Cloud/SaaS-hosted – The vendor hosts and manages the monitoring infrastructure. Teams instrument their systems with agents or API integrations that send telemetry to the vendor’s platform. This model reduces operational burden and scales more easily, making it popular with cloud-first organizations.
By 2019, SaaS-hosted monitoring was gaining significant ground, particularly among organizations that had already moved primary workloads to AWS, Azure, or GCP. Vendors like Datadog capitalized on this shift by building native integrations with cloud provider APIs.
Key Industry Verticals Driving Adoption
Demand for IT infrastructure monitoring in 2019 was broad, but several verticals showed particularly strong requirements:
- IT and Telecommunications – Service providers and MSPs needed continuous visibility into network performance and uptime SLAs.
- Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) – High transaction volumes and regulatory requirements around availability and audit trails drove investment in robust monitoring stacks.
- Healthcare – Growing digitization of clinical systems, EHR platforms, and connected medical devices increased the need for reliable infrastructure monitoring to meet uptime and compliance obligations.
- Government and Defense – Preferred on-premises or air-gapped deployments with strict access controls and audit capabilities.
- Energy and Utilities – Operational technology (OT) convergence with IT infrastructure created new monitoring requirements for SCADA systems and industrial networks.
- Transportation and Logistics – Real-time tracking systems and supply chain platforms required high-availability infrastructure monitoring.
- Aerospace and Defense – Mission-critical system reliability demands drove adoption of enterprise-grade monitoring with detailed forensic capabilities.
Market Drivers and Trends
Several forces were accelerating investment in IT infrastructure monitoring as of 2019:
- Cloud migration – As organizations moved workloads to public and hybrid cloud environments, traditional agent-based monitoring tools needed to be supplemented or replaced with platforms capable of tracking ephemeral, auto-scaling infrastructure.
- Containerization and Kubernetes – The explosion of container orchestration introduced highly dynamic environments where traditional host-based monitoring was insufficient. New tools and approaches, including service mesh observability and container-native metrics, emerged to fill this gap.
- AIOps and machine learning – Vendors began integrating anomaly detection and automated root-cause analysis into their platforms, aiming to reduce alert fatigue and speed up mean time to resolution (MTTR).
- DevOps adoption – The cultural shift toward shared ownership of infrastructure between development and operations teams drove demand for monitoring tools that were accessible to developers, not just network and systems administrators.
- Regulatory compliance – GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and other frameworks required organizations to demonstrate continuous oversight of their IT environments, making monitoring an audit requirement as well as an operational one.
Challenges Facing the Market
Despite strong growth, the IT infrastructure monitoring market in 2019 faced real constraints:
- Tool sprawl – Many organizations operated multiple overlapping monitoring tools—one for servers, another for networks, another for applications—leading to fragmented visibility and duplicated effort.
- Alert fatigue – Without intelligent filtering and correlation, monitoring systems generated overwhelming volumes of alerts, making it difficult for teams to distinguish critical signals from noise.
- Skill gaps – Configuring and maintaining monitoring platforms effectively required specialized knowledge that many teams lacked, particularly as environments grew more complex.
- Cost at scale – SaaS platforms typically charged based on data ingestion volume or host count, making costs difficult to predict and control in large environments.
- Legacy integration – Enterprises with significant on-premises infrastructure running older operating systems or proprietary hardware often found modern monitoring platforms difficult to integrate fully.
What This Means for DevOps Teams
For DevOps and platform engineering teams evaluating monitoring solutions, the 2019 landscape offered several practical takeaways:
- Open-source tools like Zabbix and Nagios remained viable for organizations with the operational capacity to run and maintain them, particularly where licensing costs were a constraint.
- Cloud-native teams with dynamic environments were increasingly gravitating toward SaaS platforms like Datadog for their integration breadth and ease of deployment.
- Enterprise organizations in regulated industries continued to invest in platforms like AppDynamics and ScienceLogic for their depth of APM capabilities and compliance features.
- Incident response was maturing as a distinct discipline, with PagerDuty positioning itself as the routing and escalation layer sitting above monitoring data sources rather than a monitoring tool itself.
Summary
The 2019 IT infrastructure monitoring market reflected broader trends in IT operations: the move to cloud, the adoption of DevOps practices, and the growing complexity of hybrid environments. Established players competed with a new generation of cloud-native platforms, and organizations had more choices—and more integration challenges—than ever before. Understanding the vendor landscape and deployment trade-offs remains relevant for any team building or evolving a monitoring strategy today.