Note: This article summarizes publicly available market context for IT infrastructure monitoring tools as of 2019. Specific figures cited in the original source report (tundratribune.com) have not been independently verified and are not reproduced here.
What Is IT Infrastructure Monitoring?
IT infrastructure monitoring encompasses the tools and practices used to observe the health, performance, and availability of an organization’s computing resources — including servers, networks, storage, virtual machines, containers, and cloud services. Monitoring platforms collect metrics, generate alerts, and provide dashboards that help operations teams detect and resolve issues before they affect end users.
By 2019, the monitoring tool market had grown significantly more complex. The rise of hybrid cloud environments, containerized workloads, and distributed microservices architectures meant that traditional agent-based, on-premises monitoring solutions were increasingly competing with SaaS-native and cloud-first platforms.
Key Vendors in the Market
The competitive landscape around 2019 included a mix of long-established on-premises vendors and newer SaaS entrants. Prominent platforms cited in market research from that period included:
- SolarWinds – Widely deployed on-premises network and infrastructure monitoring, known for its breadth of modules and ease of deployment in Windows-heavy environments.
- ManageEngine (Zoho) – Offers a broad suite of IT management tools including OpManager for infrastructure monitoring, targeting mid-market enterprises.
- Zabbix – Open-source monitoring platform with strong community adoption, capable of monitoring networks, servers, and applications at scale.
- Paessler PRTG – Network monitoring tool popular in SMB and mid-enterprise segments, using sensors to track bandwidth, uptime, and device health.
- Datadog – Cloud-native SaaS observability platform covering infrastructure, APM, logs, and synthetics; grew rapidly among teams running containerized and cloud workloads.
- Nagios – One of the oldest open-source monitoring frameworks, with a large ecosystem of plugins; the basis for several commercial derivatives.
- VMware (vRealize Operations) – Focused on monitoring virtualized and private cloud infrastructure, with deep integration into vSphere environments.
- PagerDuty – Primarily an incident management and alerting platform that integrates with monitoring tools to route and escalate alerts to on-call engineers.
- Catchpoint – Specializes in digital experience monitoring and synthetic testing from globally distributed vantage points.
- LogicMonitor – SaaS-based infrastructure monitoring with automated device discovery and a large library of pre-built monitoring modules.
- ScienceLogic – Enterprise-focused AIOps and monitoring platform with strong multi-tenant and service provider capabilities.
- Kaseya – IT management suite targeting managed service providers (MSPs), including remote monitoring and management (RMM) capabilities.
- Micro Focus (now OpenText) – Offers enterprise IT operations management tools, including network and application performance monitoring.
- NetApp – Storage and data management vendor with monitoring capabilities for storage infrastructure.
- Virtual Instruments – Focused on infrastructure performance analytics, particularly for storage area networks (SANs).
Market Drivers in 2019
Several technology and business trends were accelerating demand for infrastructure monitoring tools during this period:
- Cloud adoption: As workloads migrated to AWS, Azure, and GCP, teams needed monitoring coverage that extended beyond the data center perimeter.
- Containerization and Kubernetes: Container-based deployments introduced ephemeral, dynamic infrastructure that traditional polling-based monitors struggled to track effectively.
- Digital transformation pressure: Business-critical applications demanded higher availability SLAs, increasing the cost of undetected performance degradation.
- DevOps and SRE practices: Shorter release cycles and shared ownership of reliability drove demand for monitoring integration throughout the CI/CD pipeline.
- Security and compliance: Regulatory requirements in finance, healthcare, and government sectors mandated continuous visibility into infrastructure state and change.
Regional Market Considerations
Demand for infrastructure monitoring tools varied by region based on enterprise IT maturity, cloud adoption rates, and regulatory environment. The major geographic segments typically analyzed in market research of this era included:
- North America (United States, Canada, Mexico) – The largest market by revenue, driven by early cloud adoption and a high density of technology companies and regulated industries.
- Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia, Italy) – Strong demand, particularly in financial services, with GDPR compliance adding urgency to infrastructure visibility requirements.
- Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, South Korea, India, Southeast Asia) – A fast-growing region, with significant investment in data center infrastructure and increasing SaaS tool adoption.
- South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia) – An emerging market with growing enterprise IT investment, though adoption of advanced monitoring platforms lagged North America and Europe.
- Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa) – Driven partly by government digital transformation initiatives and investment in new data center capacity.
On-Premises vs. SaaS Monitoring: The 2019 Divide
A central strategic question for infrastructure teams in 2019 was whether to operate their own monitoring infrastructure or adopt a SaaS-delivered platform. Each approach carried distinct trade-offs:
| Dimension | Self-Hosted (e.g., Nagios, Zabbix) | SaaS (e.g., Datadog, LogicMonitor) |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | Lower (open source) or license fee | Subscription, often per-host pricing |
| Operational overhead | High — team maintains the monitoring stack | Low — vendor manages the platform |
| Scalability | Manual capacity planning required | Elastic, scales with monitored infrastructure |
| Data residency | Full control | Dependent on vendor region availability |
| Integration ecosystem | Plugin-driven, community-maintained | Broad, maintained integrations with cloud services |
Segmentation: How the Market Was Analyzed
Market research reports covering this space typically segmented the IT infrastructure monitoring tool market across several dimensions:
- By deployment type: On-premises, cloud-hosted, and hybrid.
- By organization size: Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) vs. large enterprises.
- By component: Software platforms, professional services, and managed services.
- By application: Network monitoring, server monitoring, storage monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), and end-user experience monitoring.
- By vertical: Banking and financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, government, and telecommunications.
What Changed After 2019
The 2019–2024 forecast period proved to be a period of significant consolidation and category evolution. Key developments included:
- The rise of observability as a broader discipline — encompassing metrics, logs, and traces — partially superseding traditional infrastructure monitoring as the primary frame of reference for operations teams.
- Increased M&A activity, with larger vendors acquiring specialist monitoring tools to build unified observability platforms.
- The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 accelerated remote work infrastructure deployments and cloud migration, substantially increasing the volume and complexity of environments requiring monitoring.
- Kubernetes and service mesh adoption drove demand for purpose-built container monitoring and distributed tracing capabilities.
Choosing an Infrastructure Monitoring Tool
Whether evaluating tools in 2019 or today, the core evaluation criteria remain consistent. Infrastructure and DevOps teams should consider:
- Coverage breadth: Does the tool monitor all layers of your stack — network, compute, storage, containers, and cloud services?
- Alert quality: Can you suppress noise effectively and route alerts to the right teams without overwhelming on-call engineers?
- Integration depth: Does it connect with your ticketing, incident management, and CI/CD toolchain?
- Scalability: Can it handle the volume of hosts, metrics, and events your environment generates?
- Total cost of ownership: Factor in licensing, infrastructure, and the engineering time required to maintain the monitoring platform itself.
- Data retention and compliance: How long are metrics and logs retained, and where is the data stored?
The IT infrastructure monitoring tool market remains one of the most active segments in enterprise software. Whether you are assessing open-source alternatives or evaluating full-stack SaaS observability platforms, understanding the vendor landscape and your own infrastructure complexity is the starting point for a sound tooling decision.