OpsRamp featured in eight Gartner Hype Cycles

July is Hype Cycle season, the time of year when Gartner livens up the summer doldrums by updating its eagerly awaited Hype Cycle series of reports. This year’s Hype Cycles demonstrated OpsRamp’s growing brand recognition as we were listed as a representative vendor in eight different Gartner Hype Cycles.

Gartner Hype Cycles Explained

The Gartner Hype Cycles are an annual series of reports that track the maturity, adoption and business impact of technology innovations. Technology vendors use them to guide their innovation initiatives and go-to-market strategies, while tech buyers use them to make sense of new technologies and plan technology adoption.

The Hype Cycles plot new technologies along a five-phase axis that tracks how customer expectations rise and fall over time. The first phase is the Innovation Trigger, as a new technology takes shape, hype builds and expectations rise. Then comes the self-described Peak of Inflated Expectations as the hype maxes out. Since the hype has exceeded the technology’s capabilities at this point, expectations and user sentiments then crash during the dreaded third phase, the Trough of Disillusionment. The technology improves and best practices develop during the next phase, the Slope of Enlightenment. Finally, the technology matures and stabilizes and adoption reaches a steady 20-30% of the market during the fifth and final phase, the Plateau of Productivity. The chart below provides more information on the characteristics of each phase.

Phases-of-the-Hype-Cycle-Gartner

Gartner Recognizes OpsRamp in Eight Hype Cycles Across Three Categories

After showing up in two Gartner Hype Cycles in each of the last two years, OpsRamp was recognized in eight different Hype Cycles this year. Gartner tracked us across three different categories in these Hype Cycles, demonstrating the depth and breadth of our capabilities. We solve a lot of problems for customers, from monitoring of hybrid environments to alerting to event correlation to automation and remediation. That got us recognized in the following eight areas of innovation:

Hype Cycle for Business Continuity Management and IT Resilience. This Hype Cycle is used to identify solutions for resilience, availability and recovery. Site reliability engineering (SRE), defined by Gartner as a “collection of systems and software engineering principles used to design and operate scalable resilient systems” plays a key role in keeping IT systems up and running and we were recognized in this category.

Hype Cycle for Agile and DevOps. Gartner defines DevOps as “a customer-value-driven approach to deliver solutions using agile methods, collaboration and automation.” On this Hype Cycle, we were recognized as both an SRE tool and a “Digital Platform Conductor tool,” defined by Gartner as tools that “coordinate the various infrastructure tools used to plan, implement, operate and monitor underpinning technology and services for applications and digital products.”

Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing. This Hype Cycle focuses on key cloud technologies in use today and innovations that are emerging to support future needs. SRE tools are one of those technologies—you can’t monitor and manage your cloud instances without them—and Gartner recognized OpsRamp in this area once again.

Hype Cycle for Monitoring, Observability and Cloud Operations. Formerly known as the Hype Cycle for Performance Analysis, this updated title reflects how IT operations has evolved to “support more complex distributed systems with many architectures, integrations and dependencies.” These systems are inherently unpredictable and require new systems to monitor them. Legacy tools just won’t do. That’s where we come in and Gartner recognized us as a vendor in both the Digital Platform Conductor tools and SRE categories in this report.

Hype Cycle for Cyber and IT Risk Management. Cybersecurity incidents have been on a lot of IT people’s minds over the past year, with the rise of ransomware attacks, including those that plagued SolarWinds and Kaseya customers. The Covid-19 pandemic has also accelerated IT operational changes and created more dependency on technological systems. This report was created to address that reality and recognized OpsRamp as a vendor in the “hybrid digital infrastructure management” (HDIM) space. These tools provide deeper insights into the performance of application workloads and business services regardless of where those workloads reside or who owns the infrastructure that supports them.

Hype Cycle for I&O Automation. Gartner sees infrastructure and operations (I&O) automation as the “catalyst that drives quality and agility as organizations adopt cloud computing and DevOps practices, and integrate AI capabilities.” Faster time to value, improved efficiency and cost optimization are the benefits of deploying these technologies. Gartner recognized OpsRamp across the Digital Platform Conductor tools, HDIM and SRE spaces in this Hype Cycle.

Hype Cycle for ITSM. IT service management technologies are used by IT teams to deliver services, support the business and enable the digital workplace. It’s not just for helpdesk ticketing anymore, encompassing a number of technologies including DPC tools and SRE. Once again, OpsRamp was a representative vendor in these spaces.

Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Strategies. This Hype Cycle focuses on new innovations in data center infrastructure such as net-zero data centers, intelligence and automation, containers, hyperconvergence, cloud delivery and more. SRE is once again a key part of keeping data centers innovative and resilient and Gartner recognized OpsRamp in this space.

So Where on these Hype Cycles Are We?

Site Reliability Engineering tools are the farthest along the Hype Cycle, currently sloping downward from the Peak of Inflated Expectations and headed to the Trough of Disillusionment. Many of our customers are already there and come to us for an observability solution with AIOps and automation that can support holistic business service availability and performance.

The other areas where Gartner is tracking us are much more nascent. Digital Platform Conductor tools are at the very bottom of the Innovation Trigger phase, what Gartner describes as “embryonic.” As for HDIM, that’s trending upwards in the Innovation Trigger phase and should be starting to attract interest from early adopters right about now.

If you aren’t yet looking at tools like this, may we recommend you peruse our capabilities for hybrid infrastructure monitoring and event and incident management and see what our customers are saying about us. Customer satisfaction is really the only hype that truly matters.