Gigamon launches AI tools as observability market grows

Gigamon has outlined new artificial intelligence-focused products for network observability as IDC forecasts the market will reach USD $4.39 billion by 2029.

The push centres on demand from businesses managing artificial intelligence, cloud and security workloads across hybrid infrastructure. Gigamon highlighted two products: Gigamon AI Traffic Intelligence, available now, and Gigamon Insights, currently in limited access for global customers.

Network observability tools help IT and security teams monitor traffic, identify operational issues and investigate threats across increasingly complex environments. The market has drawn more attention as companies spread workloads across data centres, virtual infrastructure, public cloud services and containers, while also dealing with higher volumes of encrypted traffic and internal east-west traffic.

In its enterprise network observability forecast, IDC said the worldwide market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 6.5 per cent over five years. Products linked to artificial intelligence, cloud and security are projected to expand at two to three times that pace.

Market shift

Those figures point to a shift in buying priorities as companies seek more detailed telemetry from their networks. Vendors are trying to tie observability more closely to cyber security operations, cloud management and application performance monitoring.

Gigamon's approach is based on collecting network-derived telemetry, including metadata, packets and flows, and feeding that information to security, cloud and observability tools. According to the company, older visibility methods struggle to provide a complete picture when infrastructure is distributed across on-premises and cloud systems.

Mark Leary, Research Director, Network Observability and Automation at IDC, said fragmented environments are creating operational challenges for users.

"Today's network observability solutions must ensure cloud computing and networking services are afforded the same level of visibility and control as on-premises systems," Leary said.

"As AI-driven workloads accelerate and environments become more distributed, organisations require deeper access to network-derived telemetry to manage performance, security, and cost. Solutions that can deliver this comprehensive, end-to-end visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments will be critical to maintaining operational resilience and supporting successful digital transformation."

AI focus

The product update reflects a broader technology industry push to build tools around workplace use of generative artificial intelligence. As companies experiment with large language models and agent-based systems, technology suppliers are offering more oversight of the traffic generated by those services, along with tools to investigate incidents and enforce internal rules.

Gigamon said AI Traffic Intelligence is designed to provide real-time visibility into generative AI and large language model traffic across more than 40 engines. The service is intended to help organisations govern AI usage, apply policies and assess risk.

Gigamon Insights is described as an agentic AI application built for network-derived telemetry. It is designed to give security and IT teams guidance during investigations and response work across distributed environments.

Shane Buckley, President and Chief Executive Officer of Gigamon, said customer demand is changing as AI systems become a larger part of enterprise infrastructure.

"AI is reshaping enterprise infrastructure and raising the stakes for network observability," Buckley said.

"Organisations can no longer rely on traditional monitoring approaches and are demanding complete visibility across all their environments and workloads. Gigamon is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation, helping customers unlock the full potential of AI while reducing risk and complexity."

Customer demand

Gigamon pointed to two trends it believes are driving spending. One is growing demand for end-to-end visibility of user and application experience across employees, customers, partners and connected devices. The other is the rise of cloud as the main domain for observability, as infrastructure and connectivity move further away from traditional on-premises setups.

That framing places network observability within a broader operational and security budget discussion. Buyers are looking not only for uptime and performance data, but also for evidence that systems handling cloud services and AI workloads can be monitored with the same rigour as older estate.

Gigamon said it serves more than 4,000 organisations worldwide, including 83 of the Fortune 100, mobile network operators and public sector agencies. Its latest product emphasis suggests vendors see AI governance, encrypted traffic analysis and hybrid cloud monitoring as areas where customers are prepared to spend.

IDC's forecast that AI-, cloud- and security-related segments could grow at two to three times the wider market rate underlines why suppliers are positioning observability software as a core operational control point rather than a background monitoring tool.