• Observability tools like Datadog, Cisco ThousandEyes, and Dynatrace provide strong application-level observability but lack deep infrastructure visibility, which can create blind spots in lifecycle management, topology mapping, and policy enforcement.

• IP Fabric fills these gaps by delivering normalized, end-to-end infrastructure snapshots. It also runs automated intent checks that reveal hidden risks, support compliance validation, and validate changes before and after rollouts.

• By integrating IP Fabric with observability tools, organizations shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive infrastructure governance. This strengthens security, maintains continuous proof of compliance, and de-risks digital transformation projects like infrastructure automation. 

If you’re like most IT teams, you’re probably embarking on a digital transformation project or two, be it a cloud migration or an SD-WAN rollout. No matter the project, your first step is the same: developing a foundational understanding of your infrastructure behavior. 

You may start off by using monitoring and observability tools like Datadog, Cisco ThousandEyes, or Dynatrace. While these tools are great for troubleshooting at the app level, they’re not built to provide deep infrastructure insights into things like device lifecycle management or network topologies. For instance, observability tools may not be able to tell you when a device is reaching End-of-Life (EoL), or if it has multiple apps running over it. Both of these situations can pose a risk to infrastructure security and compliance, which can quickly proliferate if left unchecked. 

It’s clear that there’s a visibility gap here, but you certainly don’t need another monitoring tool to fill it. Instead, what you need is a platform that serves as the “glue” for your observability stack. In other words: something that makes your infrastructure easier to understand, document, and, eventually, automate. An observability tool can tell you what’s happening now, but if you integrate it with an automated infrastructure assurance platform like IP Fabric, you can drill down into the details of how your infrastructure is behaving at any given time. That means knowing exactly what’s at risk, and having the context to remediate it before it puts a wrench in your ongoing operations or digital transformation projects.

How Do Observability Tools Fit Into Your Workflows?

Datadog, ThousandEyes, and Dynatrace are market-leading tools that helps NetOps and DevOps teams to understand what’s happening at the app and service layer. These teams trust observability tools to:

• Monitor and optimize app performance in real time.
• Detect and prioritize issues tied to customer experience and business KPIs.
• Use AI agents like Davis AI to triage symptoms and suggest where to investigate.
• Gain visibility into service-level dependencies within modern apps.
• Accelerate DevOps and SRE responsiveness through real-time feedback loops. 

Bottom line? Observability tools provide a solid view of app performance, but it’s not able to incorporate the deep insights you need to prove infrastructure-wide security and compliance. If a device slips off the radar, or a security policy drifts from business intent, you likely won’t be able to see it until it’s too late. 

What Happens If You Can’t See Your Whole Network? 

Even the best observability tools can only see what’s exposed at the service level. But in today’s dynamic and distributed infrastructures, the real problems are hiding in the interdependencies that observability tools can’t see. 

As a result, you may be left:

• Chasing false positives that don’t have a clear owner, and getting caught in a never-ending “blame game” among DevOps, NetOps, and security teams. 
• Missing topology drift like undocumented devices, unauthorized configuration changes, and shadow links.
• Draining your budget to recover from security incidents.
• Falling short on compliance due to outdated and incorrect documentation.
• Struggling to plan projects since you’re not certain about the current state of your infrastructure. 

These risks underline a fundamental truth: monitoring and observability tools can show you when something is wrong, but they can’t show you why. You can see the symptoms, but you can’t see the underlying disease, how far it’s spread, or how it’ll impact your critical operations. 

That’s why teams turn to IP Fabric for a complete picture of their infrastructure behavior. Where traditional observability stops at symptoms, IP Fabric starts by exposing the system, end-to-end, hop-by-hop, and policy-by-policy. 

Learn how to address infrastructure compliance risks by tuning in to our compliance webinar series.

How Does IP Fabric Improve Your Observability Tool?

IP Fabric doesn’t just pile on more data. Instead, it normalizes, validates, and contextualizes the data that you have so that you can actually use it. 

The platform starts by discovering every device, link, protocol, and security zone across your hybrid multicloud environment. Each time you run IP Fabric’s discovery, you get a normalized snapshot that captures the network state at any given moment in time. The platform also automatically runs a series of pre-built and custom intent checks across millions of data points in order to identify any misconfigured access controls or misaligned policies. When compliance audits roll around, these snapshots and intent checks serve as timestamped proof that security and compliance controls are applied correctly and consistently across the infrastructure.

Drawing on your library of snapshots, IP Fabric builds a digital twin of your infrastructure. This dynamic model can be used to simulate end-to-end paths that show how apps traverse all layers of segmentation, NAT, routing, and security inspection. It can also be used to troubleshoot and remediate risks in record time, as well as to determine the blast radius of a risk during an investigation. 

But what does it matter if you have these insights if you can’t share them? To prevent bottlenecks and data silos, it’s vital for NetOps, SecOps, architecture, and compliance teams to have a consumable view of the infrastructure on demand. IP Fabric delivers just that with multi-view dashboards and custom reports that can be exported in a single click. 

Watch the full webinar on “Unlocking AIOps: The Power of Dependency Mapping,” featuring IP Fabric customer, Red Hat.

How Does IP Fabric Work With Observability Tools?

IP Fabric and observability tools serve different layers of the stack, but they complement each other in several key automated and API-powered workflows, such as:

• Validating app security posture: Verify that critical controls (e.g. access, segmentation, and firewall policies) are aligned with observed app behavior. 
• Triaging risks and pinpoint the root cause: If an observability tool flags an app performance issue, IP Fabric can accelerate troubleshooting and remediation by tracing an end-to-end path. 
• De-risking changes: Before rolling out app or service changes, IP Fabric can validate that the infrastructure is configured and segmented as expected. After changes have been made, you can compare snapshots from before and after to validate that no unintended drift occurred. 
• Ensuring continuous compliance: Observability tools show the real-time impact of risks on regulated systems. Meanwhile, IP Fabric delivers snapshots and runs intent checks, which serve as timestamped proof of compliance for on-demand audit readiness. 
• Planning confidently: While observability tools inform policies at the app level, IP Fabric’s infrastructure snapshots can be used for planning larger architectural changes like migrating to the cloud or implementing Zero Trust or SD-WAN. 

Together, your observability tool and IP Fabric can give you greater context into not only app performance, but also infrastructure behavior as a whole. As a result, you can sleep soundly knowing that you’re in control of your infrastructure from the service layer and beyond. 

Want a closer look at how IP Fabric fits into your observability stack? Reach out to our team for a personalized demo, or download our free trial today.