IT Operations Software Options 2026

This guide provides an independent overview of the leading IT operations and monitoring software vendors active in 2026. It is designed to help IT leaders, operations managers, and enterprise technology buyers understand the vendor landscape across observability, AIOps, network performance monitoring, and incident management - and to find the right starting point for a software selection.

At Viewpoint Analysis, we help businesses find and select technology fast, and help IT vendors to get found by the right buyers - running super-quick selection processes and working with IT vendors to generate awareness and market understanding.

What is IT Operations and Monitoring Software?

IT operations and monitoring software covers the platforms and tools that help organisations maintain visibility into their technology infrastructure, detect and resolve issues quickly, and increasingly use artificial intelligence to predict and prevent problems before they affect end users or business services. As IT environments have grown in complexity - spanning on-premises data centres, multiple public clouds, containerised workloads, and remote workforces - the challenge of maintaining consistent visibility across all of those layers has become one of the defining operational challenges of the decade.

The market has evolved rapidly from traditional network and server monitoring tools into a broader category that now includes unified observability platforms, AIOps engines that apply machine learning to reduce alert noise and surface root causes, digital employee experience monitoring, and network performance management. These categories overlap in places, but they share a common purpose: giving IT teams the information they need to keep services running reliably and to resolve incidents faster when things go wrong.

Buyers in this category typically include heads of IT operations, infrastructure architects, DevOps and platform engineering teams, and in larger organisations, dedicated site reliability engineering (SRE) functions. The software is used both reactively - to investigate and resolve incidents - and proactively, to monitor trends, set thresholds, and increasingly to automate remediation actions without human intervention.

If you want to learn more about IT Operations Technology, our IT Operations Technology page has lots of interesting content - from vendor spotlights to technology guides and procurement suggestions.

How to Find IT Operations and Monitoring Software

The market for IT operations and monitoring software is broad, fragmented, and fast-moving. Several of the largest vendors - Dynatrace, Datadog, ServiceNow - have expanded their platforms significantly in recent years, making it harder to distinguish where one category ends and another begins. At the same time, specialist vendors continue to carve out strong positions in areas such as network performance monitoring, digital experience management, and incident response automation.

If you are at the beginning of your search and want to generate a tailored longlist of vendors matched to your specific requirements, the Longlist Builder at Viewpoint Analysis takes just a few minutes to complete and produces a shortlist aligned to your environment, priorities, and budget. For buyers who want to move quickly and have the right vendors come to them, the Technology Matchmaker Service brings the leading vendors in this category directly to you to pitch their solution - removing the initial legwork and getting you to a credible shortlist faster.

Unified Observability and AIOps Software Options 2026

Dynatrace is one of the most comprehensive unified observability and AIOps platforms available today, and consistently appears at the top of analyst rankings in the Gartner and Forrester evaluations of this market. Its Davis AI engine uses causal AI rather than simple anomaly detection to identify the precise root cause of performance issues across application, infrastructure, and cloud layers - delivering answers rather than alerts. Dynatrace uses its OneAgent technology to automatically discover and instrument applications and infrastructure without manual configuration, providing end-to-end visibility that updates in real time as environments change. It serves large enterprises across financial services, technology, retail, and public sector, and is widely regarded as one of the deepest and most mature platforms in the category.

Datadog has grown from a cloud-native infrastructure monitoring tool into a broad observability platform covering infrastructure, application performance, logs, security, and user experience in a single unified interface. Its strength lies in its breadth of integrations - covering over 600 technologies out of the box - and its appeal to DevOps and platform engineering teams who want a single pane of glass across complex, multi-cloud environments. Datadog has added significant AIOps capability in recent years, including AI-driven anomaly detection, watchdog alerts, and automated correlation of related events to reduce noise and surface meaningful incidents. It is particularly well adopted in technology companies and digital-native organisations running microservices and containerised workloads.

New Relic offers a full-stack observability platform built around a consumption-based pricing model that makes it attractive to organisations looking for predictable costs as their monitoring footprint scales. It covers application performance monitoring, infrastructure observability, log management, distributed tracing, and real user monitoring across web and mobile applications. New Relic's AI capabilities include intelligent alerting that learns normal patterns and surfaces deviations, incident correlation, and root cause analysis tooling that helps engineering teams move from detection to resolution more quickly. It is a strong option for DevOps teams and organisations that want deep application-level insight alongside broader infrastructure monitoring.

Splunk, now part of Cisco following the completion of its acquisition, remains one of the most widely deployed platforms for IT operations, security, and observability in the enterprise market. Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) provides advanced analytics, service health scoring, and event correlation across large volumes of machine data, logs, and operational metrics. Its acquisition by Cisco has accelerated integration with Cisco's networking and security portfolio, giving customers with existing Cisco infrastructure a more unified view of network and application performance. Splunk continues to be a platform of choice for organisations with complex, heterogeneous environments where the ability to interrogate large volumes of raw machine data is as important as real-time alerting.

BigPanda is a specialist AIOps platform focused specifically on event correlation and alert noise reduction - a problem that has become acute as organisations deploy multiple monitoring tools that each generate their own stream of alerts. BigPanda ingests events from across an organisation's monitoring estate, correlates them using its Open Box Machine Learning approach, and surfaces high-level incidents with probable root causes rather than thousands of individual alerts. Its transparency is a genuine differentiator - IT teams can see and tune the correlation logic, rather than relying on a black-box model they cannot inspect. BigPanda integrates with most major monitoring and ITSM platforms and is particularly well suited to large NOC and major incident management teams dealing with high alert volumes.

Elastic, through its Elastic Observability solution built on the Elastic Stack, provides a cost-effective and highly flexible platform for organisations that want to centralise logs, metrics, traces, and uptime data in a single searchable environment. It is built on open standards including OpenTelemetry, which is increasingly important for organisations seeking to avoid vendor lock-in as they standardise their telemetry collection. Elastic is widely used by engineering-led organisations that want control over their observability stack, and its deployment flexibility - available as a managed cloud service or self-hosted - makes it a viable option across a range of enterprise sizes and regulatory contexts. Its AIOps capabilities have matured significantly, including anomaly detection, log categorisation, and automated alerting based on learned behaviour patterns.

Broadcom's IT Operations and AIOps portfolio, delivered through its DX platform, is one of the longest-established in the market and reflects Broadcom's heritage in enterprise infrastructure management through its acquisition of CA Technologies. The DX platform covers application performance management, infrastructure monitoring, automation, and AIOps across hybrid and mainframe environments - making it a distinctive option for large enterprises with significant legacy infrastructure that needs to be managed alongside modern cloud workloads. Broadcom's customer base is concentrated in large, complex enterprises in financial services, telecommunications, and government sectors, where the depth of mainframe and legacy monitoring capability is a genuine requirement rather than a nice to have.

Not sure where to start with observability?

Use the free Longlist Builder to get a tailored vendor longlist based on your environment and priorities. Where this report looks at the top and most popular solutions, our Longlist Builder (powered by our AI Agent HUEY and our extensive technology vendor database and research) find the vendors that can fit your specific need, and your business size and shape.

ITSM-Led IT Operations Management Platforms 2026

ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) is the market-leading platform for organisations that want to combine IT service management and IT operations in a single environment. It provides automated discovery and service mapping to populate and maintain a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), giving IT teams an accurate, real-time view of infrastructure assets and their dependencies. ServiceNow ITOM's AIOps capabilities include event correlation, health log analytics, and predictive intelligence that surfaces potential incidents before they cause service disruption. For organisations already using ServiceNow for ITSM, the addition of ITOM creates a genuinely unified view from infrastructure event through to service desk ticket - reducing mean time to resolve and improving the quality of incident and problem management processes.

BMC Helix is a cloud-native, AI-driven IT operations management platform that unifies ITSM, ITOM, and AIOps in a single suite. Its observability capabilities span multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructure, with anomaly detection, predictive analytics, and automated event correlation that is tightly integrated with service management workflows. BMC has a long history in enterprise IT management and its Helix platform represents its fully modernised, SaaS-delivered generation of tooling. The platform is well suited to large enterprises looking to consolidate separate monitoring, service management, and automation tools onto a single platform, and its HelixGPT generative AI assistant - launched in 2024 - adds natural language interaction for troubleshooting and knowledge retrieval across IT operations workflows.

PagerDuty is the leading platform for incident response, on-call management, and AIOps-driven event intelligence. It sits at the operational centre of many enterprise IT and DevOps organisations, aggregating alerts from across a broad monitoring ecosystem and routing them to the right teams through intelligent escalation policies and on-call scheduling. PagerDuty's AIOps capability reduces alert noise significantly, correlating related events into coherent incidents and suppressing low-priority alerts so that teams can focus on what matters. Its automation capabilities allow organisations to define runbooks and response workflows that execute automatically for well-understood incident patterns, reducing the manual effort involved in Level 1 incident triage. PagerDuty is particularly well adopted in technology companies, financial services, and any organisation running digital services where uptime and response time are critical to the customer experience.

Freshservice, part of the Freshworks suite, provides an accessible and well-regarded ITSM and IT operations management platform that bridges the gap between the complexity of enterprise platforms like ServiceNow and simpler helpdesk tools. Its ITOM capabilities include infrastructure monitoring, alert management, and event correlation, integrated with its core service management workflows for incident, change, and asset management. Freshservice has invested in AI capabilities including Freddy AI, which provides intelligent ticket categorisation, suggested resolutions, and virtual agent functionality. It is a strong option for mid-market organisations and enterprises that want a capable, modern IT operations platform without the implementation complexity and licensing overhead of the larger enterprise suites.

Digital Employee Experience Monitoring Software Options 2026

Nexthink is the leading platform in the digital employee experience (DEX) monitoring category, providing real-time visibility into how employees actually experience the technology they use every day. Where traditional monitoring tools look inward at infrastructure health, Nexthink looks outward at the end-user experience - measuring device performance, application reliability, connectivity quality, and the correlation between IT issues and employee sentiment. Its Infinity platform captures telemetry from every managed endpoint in real time, enabling IT teams to detect emerging issues before they generate a flood of helpdesk tickets, and to understand the true impact of IT problems in terms of affected employees and lost productivity. Nexthink's automation engine allows IT teams to remediate common issues silently in the background, without requiring user action or service desk involvement. For organisations with large, distributed workforces - particularly those that moved rapidly to hybrid working - Nexthink provides a level of endpoint visibility and proactive experience management that is genuinely difficult to replicate with traditional monitoring approaches.

Aternity, now part of Riverbed Technology, is a digital experience management platform that provides deep visibility into application performance as experienced by end users, rather than as measured at the server or network layer. It captures user experience data from physical and virtual endpoints, correlating application response times, crash rates, and user workflow metrics with underlying infrastructure and network performance data. Aternity is particularly well suited to organisations running complex enterprise application estates - SAP, Citrix, custom business applications - where the relationship between backend performance and frontend user experience is not always straightforward. Its integration with Riverbed's network performance portfolio creates a powerful combined view spanning endpoint experience, application performance, and network behaviour.

1E is a digital employee experience and endpoint management platform with a strong focus on real-time remediation and endpoint compliance. It provides visibility into endpoint health, application experience, and security posture across large enterprise estates, and its Tachyon technology enables IT teams to query and remediate endpoints in real time at scale - pushing fixes to thousands of devices simultaneously without requiring a service desk ticket. 1E has built out its DEX capability significantly in recent years, adding sentiment collection and experience scoring alongside its established endpoint management and software licence optimisation heritage. It is a well-regarded option for large enterprises, particularly in regulated industries where endpoint compliance and security posture visibility are as important as performance monitoring.

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Network Performance Monitoring and WAN Optimisation Software Options 2026

Riverbed Technology is one of the most established and respected names in network performance management and WAN optimisation, with a portfolio that has evolved to address the hybrid and cloud networking realities of 2026. Its SteelHead WAN optimisation appliances have long been the reference standard for organisations with geographically distributed networks carrying high volumes of enterprise application traffic, and its SteelConnect SD-WAN platform provides the modern, software-defined network overlay that many of those same organisations are now deploying to replace or augment legacy MPLS networks. Riverbed's Alluvio platform consolidates its network performance monitoring, application experience management, and cloud visibility capabilities into a unified observability offering - spanning network flow analytics, packet capture, and the Aternity digital experience data discussed above. For organisations managing complex, multi-site enterprise networks that need consistent application performance visibility from the WAN edge through to the end-user device, Riverbed provides one of the most comprehensive and battle-tested portfolios in the market.

SolarWinds is one of the most widely deployed network monitoring platforms globally, with a broad portfolio spanning network performance monitoring, server and application monitoring, database monitoring, and IT service management. Its Network Performance Monitor and NetFlow Traffic Analyser products are particularly well established in mid-market and enterprise environments, providing deep network visibility through SNMP polling, flow data collection, and network path analysis. SolarWinds has rebuilt its platform architecture and security posture significantly following the 2020 supply chain incident, and its Orion platform successor delivers improved cloud-native architecture alongside its established monitoring depth. It remains a strong choice for organisations looking for comprehensive network and infrastructure monitoring without the pricing complexity of some of the larger enterprise observability platforms.

LogicMonitor is a SaaS-based hybrid observability platform that provides automated monitoring across on-premises infrastructure, cloud environments, and network devices from a single cloud-delivered console. Its LM Envision platform covers network performance monitoring, server and storage monitoring, cloud resource monitoring, and application performance in an integrated environment that is notable for its ease of deployment - most customers report going from installation to useful monitoring data within hours rather than days. LogicMonitor's AIOps capabilities include anomaly detection and dynamic thresholding that adjusts alert thresholds automatically as normal behaviour patterns change, reducing false positives. It is well suited to managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprise IT teams that need broad monitoring coverage across heterogeneous environments without the overhead of managing separate tools for each infrastructure domain.

AppDynamics, part of Cisco, is an application intelligence platform that provides business-centric visibility into application performance, tying technical metrics to business outcomes such as revenue impact, customer conversion rates, and transaction volumes. It covers full-stack application monitoring including code-level diagnostics, infrastructure performance, and end-user experience, with AI-driven anomaly detection and root cause analysis that surfaces issues in terms of their business impact rather than just their technical symptoms. AppDynamics is most commonly deployed in large enterprises running complex, revenue-critical applications where the ability to quantify the business cost of a performance issue - and prioritise response accordingly - is as valuable as the technical diagnostic capability itself.

ManageEngine, part of Zoho Corporation, provides a comprehensive suite of IT operations and network monitoring tools that are widely used in mid-market and enterprise organisations looking for capable, cost-effective alternatives to the larger platform vendors. Its OpManager network monitoring platform, Applications Manager APM tool, and AlarmsOne event management product cover much of the same functional ground as more expensive enterprise platforms, at a price point that makes them accessible to IT teams with tighter budgets. ManageEngine has invested in AI capabilities across its portfolio and its observability tools now include anomaly detection, predictive analytics, and automated alert correlation. It is particularly well represented in the UK mid-market and in public sector organisations where value for money is a primary procurement consideration.

How to Select IT Operations and Monitoring Software

Selecting an IT operations and monitoring platform is a decision with long-term architectural consequences. Many of the platforms in this category become deeply embedded in how an IT function operates - feeding data into service management workflows, informing capacity planning decisions, and increasingly automating remediation actions. Getting the selection wrong is expensive and disruptive, so the evaluation process deserves genuine investment of time and rigour.

Start by being clear about your primary use case and the layer of the stack you most need to instrument. Organisations whose primary pain is application performance for end users have different requirements to those whose primary challenge is network visibility across a distributed estate, or those that need to reduce alert fatigue in a busy network operations centre. The vendor landscape reflects these differences - some platforms are genuinely broad, while others have clear strengths in specific domains. Evaluating a network performance monitoring specialist against a full-stack observability platform on the same scorecard often produces misleading results.

Consider your existing tool landscape carefully. Most organisations already have some monitoring tooling in place, and the question is often whether to consolidate onto a single platform, integrate specialist tools into a common event management layer, or replace point solutions with a broader platform. Platforms like ServiceNow ITOM and BMC Helix are designed to act as the orchestration layer above existing monitoring tools, while platforms like Dynatrace and Datadog are designed to replace them. Understanding which approach fits your environment and your appetite for change is a critical early decision.

For organisations at the longlisting stage, a Rapid RFI from Viewpoint Analysis provides a fast, structured way to assess the market and get to a shortlist of credible vendors quickly. For buyers who have already identified a shortlist and need to reach a decision, a Rapid RFP delivers a lean, focused selection process that reaches a vendor decision in weeks rather than months. If speed is the overriding priority, the 30-Day Technology Selection service combines both into a single compressed process that reaches a decision in under one month.

For a comprehensive reference on how to run a technology selection process, the Enterprise Software Selection Playbook 2026 covers the full process from initial requirements definition through to contract negotiation and onboarding.

Summary

The IT operations and monitoring software market in 2026 is one of the most dynamic and strategically important categories in enterprise technology. The convergence of observability, AIOps, digital employee experience, and network performance management is creating a new generation of platforms that promise end-to-end visibility from the network edge to the end-user device - and increasingly the intelligence to act on that visibility automatically.

The vendor landscape divides broadly into three groups. The large, platform-oriented vendors - Dynatrace, Datadog, ServiceNow, Splunk - are competing to be the single observability and operations platform for complex enterprises, and each has made significant investments in AI capability to differentiate. The ITSM-led platforms - BMC Helix, PagerDuty, Freshservice - offer strong integration between operations monitoring and service management workflows, which is particularly valuable for organisations where incident management process is as important as raw monitoring depth. And the specialist vendors - Nexthink in digital employee experience, Riverbed in network performance and WAN, SolarWinds and LogicMonitor in hybrid network monitoring - continue to deliver deep capability in specific domains that the platform vendors have not fully replicated.

For buyers, the key takeaways are: be clear about your primary instrumentation need before evaluating vendors; take seriously the question of whether you want to consolidate onto a single platform or best-of-breed; and pay close attention to total cost of ownership including implementation and ongoing administration, which varies considerably across this market. Independent advice at the start of the process pays dividends - this is a category where the marketing is sophisticated and the differences between platforms are not always visible from product documentation alone.

How Viewpoint Analysis Can Help

Whether you are at the beginning of your search or already shortlisting, Viewpoint Analysis offers a range of services designed to help you find, select, and get the best from IT operations and monitoring software.

• Use the free Longlist Builder to generate a tailored list of vendors in minutes.

  
  

• Engage the Technology Matchmaker Service to have the right vendors come to you.

  
  

• Run a Rapid RFI to assess the market and reach a shortlist quickly, or a Rapid RFP to drive a structured selection to a decision. If you need to move fast, the 30-Day Technology Selection service gets you from requirements to vendor decision in under a month.

  
  

• For deeper reading on how to run a technology selection, download the Enterprise Software Selection Playbook 2026 - the definitive independent guide to enterprise software procurement.

Have we missed a vendor?

This guide covers the major platforms active in the UK and internationally. If there is a vendor you think should be included, or you would like to discuss your specific requirements, contact Viewpoint Analysis and we will be happy to help.

Get in Touch

If you are currently evaluating IT operations or monitoring software and would like independent guidance, or if you are a vendor in this space and would like to tell us more about your solution, we would be glad to hear from you. Request a call with Viewpoint Analysis to get started.