Frost Radar™: Cloud-Native Application Monitoring Platforms, 2025

Growth Environment

• The automated application development lifecycle uses CI/CD pipelines to ensure that applications are available, resilient, automatable, scalable, and manageable.
• The CNCF survey found that the most common challenges related to the use of cloud-native applications are culture changes in the development team, CI/CD, lack of training, security, and monitoring.
• Monitoring becomes more challenging as K8s and microservices fragment the application stack, which is radically different than what most organizations are used to with traditional applications that consist of a single, large codebase. Services in cloud-native applications are often spun up and down rapidly—sometimes even before a comprehensive monitoring process from traditional tools is completed. Many organizations deploy their cloud-native applications across different cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to maximize the benefits that each offers and reduce the possibility of vendor lock-in.
• Failure to automatically collect and correlate telemetry data, such as metrics, logs, traces, and alerts, or have a unified view of the entire cloud-native landscape will significantly affect an organization's ability to identify, detect, and respond to performance and security issues quickly. Without this visibility, organizations must manually sieve through the massive volume of telemetry data, increasing application downtime, causing performance degradation and derailing user experience. In today’s environment, where customers’ demands are constantly evolving and there is little brand loyalty, a poor user experience can lead to the loss of a customer.
• A cloud-native application monitoring platform examines performance across layers of the cloud-native stacks, including cloud infrastructure, workloads, and applications, as well as application-level issues such as errors and latency by collecting, processing, and analyzing telemetry data to ensure application performance, reliability, and security.

Growth Environment

• A cloud-native application monitoring platform monitors and manages:
  • Cloud compute, storage, and network performance and activities; host and CPU utilization; operating systems, services, and other resources; and user interactions and access patterns.
  • Containerized workloads and their performance, K8s clusters and orchestration layers, and communication and dependencies between microservices.
  • Code execution and performance of libraries, end-to-end application workflows and dependencies, and key performance indicators related to response times, error rates, and throughput.
• While these functionalities have shaped the core of a cloud-native application monitoring platform, rapid digital transformation has made many organizations’ IT environments increasingly complex and pushed the boundaries of “monitoring” capabilities. “Observability” is now the preferred term to describe the task of monitoring across broader multicloud, hybrid environments.
• This shift means a cloud-native application monitoring platform now rarely stands on its own but rather is a component of a broader observability platform that provides comprehensive visibility across the entire environment, from infrastructure and network layers to application performance and user experience. From this, the observability platform not only collects and visualizes data but also correlates telemetry data across different stack, identifies anomalies and suspicious behavior, and provides actionable insights that can enhance an organization’s ability to be more proactive in risk mitigation.

Strategic Imperative and Growth Environment

• Organizations in North America historically have been early adopters of emerging technologies. This is true of cloud computing, so they were among the first to confront the operational challenges related to monitoring cloud-native applications.
• Organizations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) are also embracing cloud-native technologies, which has led to the rapid growth of containers and K8s usage and made cloud-native application monitoring platforms a necessity. Wars and other geopolitical tensions in the region have prompted many to pull back on spending and focus more on maintaining a positive cash flow to weather the economic uncertainty.
• Organizations in more digitally mature Asia-Pacific (APAC) countries, such as Singapore and Australia, are leading the charge in adopting cloud-native application monitoring platforms because they are further along on their digital transformation journeys than counterparts in Indonesia and the Philippines, for example, that have probably either just started or are in the middle of their journeys. However, unfavorable exchange rates and budgetary constraints might restrain adoption.
• In Latin America, a combination of factors, including the region’s low cloud maturity level, dearth of specialized cloud talent, and cost sensitivity, will limit investments.
• A Frost & Sullivan study related to this independent analysis:
  • Growth Opportunities in Cloud-Native Application Monitoring Platforms, 2024–2029 (PFT3-74; soon to be published).