Why Do Most ‘Full-Stack Observability’ Tools Miss the Network?

25/11/2025 24 min Temporada 1 Episodio 70
Why Do Most ‘Full-Stack Observability’ Tools Miss the Network?

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Episode Synopsis

Tech leaders are often led to believe that they have “full-stack observability.” The MELT framework—metrics, events, logs, and traces—became the industry standard for visibility. However, Robert Cowart, CEO and Co-Founder of ElastiFlow, believes that this MELT framework leaves a critical gap. In the latest episode of the Tech Transformed podcast, host Dana Gardner, President and Principal Analyst at Interabor Solutions, sits down with Cowart to discuss network observability and its vitality in achieving full-stack observability.The speakers discuss the limitations of legacy observability tools that focus on MELT and how this leaves a significant and dangerous blind spot. Cowart emphasises the need for teams to integrate network data enriched with application context to enhance troubleshooting and security measures. What’s Beyond MELT?Cowart explains that when it comes to the MELT framework, meaning “metrics, events, logs, and traces, think about the things that are being monitored or observed with that information. This is alluded to servers and applications.“Organisations need to understand their compute infrastructure and the applications they are running on. All of those servers are connected to networks, and those applications communicate over the networks, and users consume those services again over the network,” he added.“What we see among our growing customer base is that there's a real gap in the full-stack story that has been told in the market for the last 10 years, and that is the network.”The lack of insights results in a constant blind spot that delays problem-solving, hides user-experience issues, and leaves organizations vulnerable to security threats. Cowart notes that while performance monitoring tools can identify when an application call to a database is slow, they often don’t explain why.“Was the database slow, or was the network path between them rerouted and causing delays?” he questions. “If you don’t see the network, you can’t find the root cause.”The outcome is longer troubleshooting cycles, isolated operations teams, and an expensive “blame game” among DevOps, NetOps, and SecOps.Elastiflow’s approaches it differently. They focus on observability to network connectivity—understanding who is communicating with whom and how that communication behaves. This data not only speeds up performance insights but also acts as a “motion detector” within the organization. Monitoring east-west, north-south, and cloud VPC flow logs helps organizations spot unusual patterns that indicate internal threats or compromised systems used for launching external attacks.“Security teams are often good at defending the perimeter,” Cowart says. “But once something gets inside, visibility fades. Connectivity data fills that gap.”Isolated Monitoring to Unified Experience Cowart believes that observability can’t just be about green lights...

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