Network-Derived Telemetry Deemed ‘Essential.’ Who Knew?

You did, of course.

A new Gartner® Reference Architecture for Service-Level Observability1 research note provides a comprehensive review of all things telemetry, naming a plethora of technologies that work together to measure and anticipate system health.

We are pleased that network-level instrumentation is now considered a strategic part of this architecture, and we believe it serves as excellent validation of what our customers have known for years: that infrastructure-generated telemetry yields faster decisions, lower risk, and more resilient digital services.

“These telemetry sources are essential for understanding network behavior across cloud and hybrid environments, especially for security, compliance, and troubleshooting scenarios.” – Gartner

From “Nice to Have” to “Non-Negotiable”

From my perspective, the new Gartner reference architecture makes it clear: To truly understand service health, telemetry must be anchored to the service itself and correlated across application, infrastructure, and network layers. This isn’t about more dashboards; it’s about enabling faster, better decisions that directly impact customer experience, revenue, and risk.

Directors in NetOps, SecOps, and CloudOps have felt this shift. Hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, modern applications, and AI workloads have multiplied both data volumes and resulting visibility gaps. The right question now is: “If this service slows down or fails, can we quickly determine why, across code, infrastructure, and the network, before users are impacted?” The answer: only if you treat telemetry as a designed architecture, not an afterthought.

“Network-level instrumentation is especially valuable in distributed systems where modifying application code is impractical or where heterogeneous environments require a consistent observability layer.” – Gartner

Telemetry Pipelines: The Strategic Control Point

Moor Insights & Strategy has similarly argued that treating telemetry pipelines as an afterthought is a mistake; they must be a strategic necessity for both observability and security. Modern pipelines do more than collect and route data, they unify signals from across the stack, including the network, and serve as control points for normalization, enrichment, and cost control.

“Gone are the days when telemetry was just about collecting logs.” –Moor Insights & Strategy

But the real leap comes with network-derived telemetry. Moor Insights stresses that a complete telemetry strategy must include packet data, flow records, and rich metadata, which Gigamon delivers with its deep observability pipeline.

Gartner and the Rise of Network-Level Telemetry

I believe that Gartner’s placement of network-level instrumentation on equal footing with other infrastructure telemetry underscores its growing importance to the enterprise.

“These technologies operate at the communication layer and provide a unified view of network behavior, enabling monitoring, policy enforcement, and traffic shaping alongside observability. They are a critical complement to code-level and system-level instrumentation.”

We consider this to be significant validation: without deep, network-driven insight, visibility of service behavior is incomplete. Network-derived telemetry enables organizations to detect misconfigurations and bottlenecks across the network, observe actual service dependencies and topology, and validate that trace context and policies are applied consistently across platforms and clouds.

Security: Another Essential Dimension

While the Gartner architecture focuses on service health and reliability, the same signals are invaluable for security.

Log manipulation is cyberattack 101, and some endpoints cannot even sustain agents. If an endpoint is compromised, how would you know? By watching the network, of course. On the wire, attackers have nowhere to hide. Call it a second source of truth. And it gets better… with NAT in a network, it’s tough to associate a log on firewall A with a log on proxy B, but deep observability joins these disparate logs. Bringing logs and network-level instrumentation together provides organizations with the deep observability required to enable strong security assurance.

“In addition to active instrumentation, infrastructure components often emit passive telemetry such as flow logs and traffic metadata. These sources provide visibility into traffic that may be dropped or filtered before reaching application-level instrumentation, such as denied requests blocked by firewalls or security groups.” –Gartner

Moreover, by integrating network-derived telemetry into both observability and security workflows, leaders can give NetOps, SecOps, and CloudOps a shared operational truth. This creates better alignment with zero trust and compliance mandates, better alignment on shared security responsibility, and better alignment on tool spending across departments.

What Strategic Telemetry Management Looks Like

So, how do you move from today’s patchwork of tools and dashboards to a strategic telemetry approach that delivers service-level observability and security? For a director-level owner, the playbook might look like this:

1. Start from Your Most Critical Services

For each, map which telemetry you have and where gaps exist across application, infrastructure, network, and security domains paying particular attention to hybrid boundaries.

2. Elevate Telemetry Pipelines to an Architectural Tier

Treat your telemetry pipeline as a control plane for data, not just plumbing. Use it to reduce noise, enrich with service and business context, and re-use across observability platforms, security operations, and data stores with AI analysis capability.

3. Upgrade Network-Derived Telemetry to First-Class Status

Ensure you have consistent, scalable capture of packets and flows across data center, virtual, container, and cloud environments. Integrate that telemetry into existing observability and security tools so teams can rapidly identify performance issues, policy violations, and threats in one operational flow, not separate silos.

4. Measure Outcomes, Not Just Volumes

Track improvements in speed of deployment, resource optimization, cloud spend control, and application acceleration. Tie those metrics back to the services and business capabilities that executives care about.

Gartner recommends that, “By grouping telemetry under the same service boundary and layering context, such as deployment events or dependency maps, visualization enables faster troubleshooting, validation of SLO, and alignment of technical insights with business outcomes.”

Deep Observability Pipeline from Gigamon: The Essential Ingredient

Within this broader strategy, the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline plays a focused but critical role: Delivering deep, scalable network telemetry into your existing pipelines and platforms. This enriches telemetry with context, making correlation and analysis at the service level faster and more accurate, while reducing the volume of data that downstream tools must ingest. And you’ll be happy to hear that the deep observability pipeline produces metadata that is designed for modern AI, ready for agentic analysis of threats, performance, and more.

For our customers like you, the value is straightforward: Lower risk by eliminating blind spots, higher service resilience through faster diagnosis of complex issues, and better economics by reducing noise and storage.

We see Gartner’s recognition of network-level instrumentation as “essential” as validation of what many of your teams have already been moving toward. The next step is to formalize it as part of a strategic telemetry management program, one that treats telemetry not as an afterthought, but as an architectural design for making faster decisions, reducing risk, and delivering resilient digital services.

Gartner, Reference Architecture Brief: Service-level Observability
7 January 2026 – ID G00842494
By: D.B. Cummings, Dylan Roberts

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