Monitoring Tools Market

Monitoring Tools Market Latest Trends

AI-native observability is becoming one of the defining Monitoring Tools Market trends. Vendors are embedding autonomous investigation agents, natural-language querying, anomaly detection, causal analysis, automated incident summaries, code remediation recommendations, and predictive service-health functions directly into monitoring platforms. These capabilities are changing the operating model from dashboards that require engineers to interpret signals toward systems that identify abnormal behavior, assess likely causes, recommend actions, and initiate approved workflows.

OpenTelemetry is simultaneously reshaping instrumentation architecture. In the latest observability survey, 65% of organizations reported investment in both Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, demonstrating strong demand for vendor-neutral telemetry collection and portable monitoring pipelines. Open standards let enterprises send metrics, traces, and logs to multiple backends while reducing dependence on proprietary agents. This trend encourages monitoring suppliers to compete on analytics, automation, retention, visualization, security, and operational intelligence rather than instrumentation lock-in.

Another trend is observability expansion into AI systems, agentic applications, databases, data pipelines, streaming platforms, business transactions, and customer journeys. Monitoring vendors are adding model latency tracking, agent traces, prompt diagnostics, AI evaluation workflows, token analytics, database workload visibility, real-user monitoring, and synthetic testing. Enterprises increasingly want one operational platform capable of following a transaction from end-user activity through application services, infrastructure dependencies, data systems, and AI components.

Tool consolidation is also influencing procurement. Organizations want fewer disconnected consoles, unified data models, lower telemetry duplication, centralized governance, and consistent incident workflows. This is strengthening full-stack observability platforms while pressuring specialized monitoring tools to demonstrate deep technical differentiation or seamless interoperability.

Monitoring Tools Market Dynamics

Monitoring Tools Market dynamics are shaped by cloud migration, distributed applications, rising telemetry volumes, operational resilience requirements, AI-assisted IT operations, cybersecurity integration, and growing pressure to control monitoring complexity. Modern digital environments generate signals across containers, APIs, virtual machines, databases, networks, SaaS services, endpoints, and user sessions. AI-enabled observability can lower outage-related operational impact by up to 48% through faster correlation and root-cause analysis, strengthening the business case for automated monitoring architectures.

At the same time, buyers face telemetry costs, fragmented tools, integration work, data-governance obligations, and specialist skill shortages. Competition therefore centers on balancing monitoring depth with automation, usability, openness, predictable consumption, and deployment flexibility.

Drivers of Market Growth

DRIVER

Increasing adoption of AI-powered full-stack observability.

AI-powered observability is the primary structural driver of the Monitoring Tools Market because distributed systems increasingly exceed the practical capacity of manual investigation. Enterprises require platforms capable of identifying dependencies, correlating signals, detecting abnormal patterns, and prioritizing incidents without requiring engineers to inspect each metric or log stream independently. Unified application and infrastructure observability is used by 85% of surveyed organizations in some capacity, indicating strong demand for consolidated operational intelligence.

Cloud-native applications strengthen this requirement because individual business services may depend on containers, managed databases, APIs, serverless functions, networking layers, third-party services, and end-user devices. AI-assisted platforms can compare behavior across these dependencies and generate causal hypotheses from telemetry. Monitoring is consequently becoming embedded in software engineering, site reliability engineering, cloud operations, cybersecurity, FinOps, and digital experience teams.

Generative AI also expands the value of monitoring data. Natural-language interfaces let users investigate incidents without manually creating complex queries, while autonomous agents can perform initial triage before human responders begin analysis. This reduces repetitive diagnostic work and increases monitoring accessibility across technical roles.

Market Restraints

RESTRAINT

Tool sprawl and operational complexity across fragmented environments.

The Monitoring Tools Market is restrained by the complexity created when organizations deploy multiple observability, network, logging, security, APM, cloud, and digital experience products. A global observability survey identified complexity and operational overhead as the leading obstacle for 39% of respondents. Fragmentation can generate duplicate telemetry pipelines, inconsistent alert logic, overlapping agents, disconnected dashboards, and separate ownership models.

Tool sprawl also increases integration requirements. Engineering teams must maintain collectors, APIs, dashboards, retention policies, alerting rules, authentication models, access controls, and data pipelines across different platforms. Migrating from established monitoring stacks can be difficult because historical dashboards, incident workflows, custom queries, and integrations become embedded in operational processes.

Large telemetry volumes add another barrier. Detailed traces, high-cardinality metrics, security events, logs, and profiling data require substantial storage and processing capacity. Organizations may respond by sampling data, shortening retention periods, or limiting coverage, which can reduce diagnostic depth. Vendors are addressing this restraint through unified platforms, adaptive sampling, tiered storage, OpenTelemetry support, automated configuration, and telemetry pipeline management.

Market Opportunities

OPPORTUNITY

Expansion of cloud-delivered observability and managed monitoring services.

Cloud-delivered monitoring creates a significant market opportunity because enterprises increasingly want scalable telemetry analytics without operating monitoring infrastructure themselves. A global observability study found that 37% of organizations primarily or exclusively use SaaS observability setups. SaaS models reduce responsibility for maintaining monitoring databases, scaling ingestion clusters, applying platform updates, and managing underlying storage systems.

The opportunity is particularly significant among SMEs, cloud-native businesses, distributed development teams, and enterprises consolidating legacy tools. Vendors can extend adoption through guided onboarding, automatic instrumentation, consumption controls, prebuilt integrations, managed OpenTelemetry collectors, vertical-specific dashboards, and integrated incident workflows.

Managed services create another route to expansion. Organizations with limited observability expertise increasingly rely on systems integrators and managed service providers for implementation, dashboard development, telemetry optimization, alert tuning, and operational support. Monitoring suppliers that build strong channel ecosystems can serve customers that require advanced capabilities without maintaining dedicated observability teams.

The next opportunity is AI workload observability. Agentic applications, foundation-model services, AI pipelines, and machine-learning systems introduce new requirements involving model behavior, latency, evaluations, traceability, reliability, security, and governance.

Market Challenges

CHALLENGES

Controlling telemetry costs while maintaining sufficient diagnostic depth.

Monitoring platforms must process growing volumes of logs, metrics, traces, profiles, events, and application context without creating unsustainable infrastructure or subscription costs. Cost was identified as a leading tool-selection priority by 74% of observability survey respondents, placing strong commercial pressure on vendors to improve telemetry efficiency and pricing transparency.

High-cardinality telemetry presents a specific challenge because modern applications generate detailed labels, container identifiers, user attributes, transaction information, and dynamic service metadata. Retaining every signal at full fidelity increases storage and processing requirements, but aggressive sampling can remove evidence required during complex incidents.

Organizations also need consistent visibility across hybrid environments without sending every sensitive data point to an external platform. Financial services, government, healthcare, industrial, and critical-infrastructure customers may require local processing, data residency, controlled retention, or selective telemetry export.

Vendors are therefore investing in intelligent filtering, adaptive sampling, edge processing, tiered logs, usage analytics, archive options, and configurable retention. Market differentiation increasingly depends on delivering strong monitoring coverage while giving customers precise control over data volumes and operational costs.

Monitoring Tools SWOT Analysis

Strengths

• Monitoring tools provide continuous operational visibility across applications, infrastructure, networks, databases, cloud services, security events, and user experiences.

• Full-stack platforms reduce diagnostic fragmentation by correlating multiple telemetry signals within a common operational context.

• AI-based anomaly detection and causal analysis improve the speed at which engineering teams identify abnormal service behavior.

• Open-source observability has strong ecosystem support, with 76% of surveyed organizations using open-source licensing in some capacity.

The market also benefits from strong integration with major cloud platforms, DevOps pipelines, incident-management systems, collaboration software, and security operations. This makes monitoring a persistent part of digital infrastructure rather than a discretionary application layer.

Weaknesses

• Complex monitoring stacks can require significant configuration, tuning, instrumentation, and integration work.

• Excessive alerts create operational noise when thresholds and correlation logic are poorly designed.

• Telemetry duplication increases storage requirements and complicates governance across multiple tools.

• Organizations use an average of eight observability technologies, illustrating continued fragmentation even as consolidation becomes a procurement priority.

Legacy environments create additional weaknesses because older applications may lack standardized instrumentation. Some monitoring platforms also impose proprietary data models that complicate migration and interoperability.

Opportunities

• AI agents can automate incident investigation, operational recommendations, troubleshooting, and selected remediation workflows.

• OpenTelemetry creates opportunities for vendors that deliver differentiated analytics on top of portable instrumentation.

• Monitoring can expand into AI applications, data platforms, digital experience, security operations, FinOps, and industrial edge environments.

• OpenTelemetry production usage has reached 41% among surveyed organizations, providing a growing addressable base for compatible commercial backends.

Managed observability services and cloud marketplaces also give vendors access to organizations that prefer simplified procurement and implementation.

Threats

• Hyperscale cloud providers can bundle native monitoring into broader infrastructure relationships.

• Open standards reduce instrumentation lock-in and make backend switching technically easier.

• Price competition can intensify as organizations scrutinize ingestion, indexing, retention, and high-cardinality telemetry costs.

• The leading cloud infrastructure providers controlled 63% of global infrastructure spending in a recent quarter, giving native monitoring services significant distribution leverage.

Independent vendors also face threats from open-source alternatives and platform consolidation among enterprise software suppliers.

Monitoring Tools Segmentation Analysis

Monitoring Tools Market segmentation reflects differences in technical function, delivery architecture, buyer scale, and operating environment. Component segmentation separates software platforms from associated services, while deployment segmentation distinguishes cloud-delivered environments from locally managed systems. End-user segmentation captures differences in reliability, compliance, transaction volume, and infrastructure complexity. Organization-size segmentation reflects different procurement capabilities, integration requirements, and monitoring maturity.

By Component

Solutions held 66.85% of the Monitoring Tools Market in the latest validated segmentation. The solutions category includes infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, security/log and SIEM capabilities, and digital experience monitoring. Infrastructure monitoring focuses on servers, networks, virtual machines, containers, cloud resources, storage, and other technology assets, while APM examines application transactions, service dependencies, errors, latency, and code-level behavior.

Security/log and SIEM capabilities connect operational telemetry with threat detection, investigation, and audit requirements. Digital experience monitoring evaluates application availability and performance from the end-user perspective using real-user and synthetic techniques.

Services support implementation, migration, integration, dashboard configuration, telemetry architecture, optimization, training, and managed operations. Their role increases as enterprises consolidate tools and deploy OpenTelemetry across complex environments. Service providers are especially relevant when internal engineering teams lack specialized observability expertise or require assistance redesigning monitoring architecture across hybrid infrastructure.

By Deployment

Cloud deployment accounted for 71.60% of the Monitoring Tools Market, reflecting the strong alignment between SaaS monitoring and cloud-native application architectures. Cloud monitoring platforms can scale ingestion and analytics without requiring customers to maintain dedicated observability infrastructure. They also simplify software updates, distributed access, integrations, and monitoring across multi-cloud environments.

Cloud deployment is widely used by digital businesses, SaaS providers, retailers, technology companies, distributed enterprises, and organizations adopting containers or serverless services. Consumption-based deployment can also simplify initial adoption by reducing infrastructure installation requirements.

On-premises monitoring remains strategically important in banking, government, healthcare, industrial environments, defense-related operations, and organizations operating sensitive workloads. Buyers in these sectors may prioritize telemetry sovereignty, local storage, deterministic performance, security controls, or internal policy requirements. Hybrid monitoring architectures increasingly connect on-premises infrastructure with public-cloud resources through unified dashboards and collectors, allowing enterprises to preserve data control without sacrificing centralized operational visibility.

By End User

IT and telecom accounted for 29.10% of Monitoring Tools Market demand in the latest segmentation. Telecommunications providers operate complex networks, distributed computing resources, customer-facing services, APIs, edge infrastructure, and strict availability requirements, making continuous visibility critical. Technology companies likewise depend on monitoring platforms to maintain application reliability across rapid software-release cycles and cloud-native architectures.

BFSI organizations use monitoring for transaction reliability, digital banking, compliance, fraud-related infrastructure visibility, and operational resilience. Retail and e-commerce companies emphasize website availability, payment flows, mobile performance, and digital customer experience.

Healthcare organizations monitor clinical applications, connected systems, infrastructure, and protected-data environments. Media and entertainment companies depend on performance monitoring for streaming services and digital delivery. Energy and utilities require visibility across enterprise IT, networks, cloud applications, and selected operational environments. Government and public-sector agencies apply monitoring to digital services, security operations, modernization programs, citizen-facing platforms, and mission-critical systems.

By Organization Size

Large enterprises held 61.80% of the Monitoring Tools Market, supported by extensive application portfolios, distributed infrastructure, multi-cloud environments, regulatory obligations, and dedicated IT operations teams. Large organizations commonly require full-stack observability, role-based access, service-level management, security integrations, topology mapping, customized retention policies, global deployment support, and integrations with enterprise service-management platforms.

Small and medium enterprises increasingly adopt cloud-delivered monitoring because SaaS platforms reduce infrastructure administration and allow monitoring capabilities to scale with application usage. SMEs frequently prioritize simplified deployment, automated discovery, prebuilt dashboards, transparent pricing, and low-maintenance integrations.

Managed monitoring services can further increase SME adoption by reducing the need for dedicated site-reliability or observability specialists. Open-source technologies also provide an entry path, while commercial platforms compete by offering easier setup, hosted storage, automatic updates, AI assistance, technical support, and integrated incident-management functionality.

Regional Analysis

Regional performance differs according to cloud maturity, enterprise software adoption, data regulation, digital infrastructure investment, availability of DevOps talent, and the concentration of technology vendors. North America remains the most mature commercial environment, Europe emphasizes regulated and controlled monitoring architectures, Asia-Pacific benefits from rapid digital infrastructure expansion, and the Middle East & Africa market is developing through cloud modernization, public-sector digitization, telecommunications investment, and smart-infrastructure initiatives.

• North America: The United States represents 87.4% of the North American Monitoring Tools Market, reflecting its concentration of major cloud providers, observability vendors, large digital enterprises, financial institutions, healthcare systems, retailers, telecom operators, and government technology buyers. North American enterprises commonly operate hybrid architectures combining public cloud, private cloud, SaaS, traditional data centers, Kubernetes environments, databases, network infrastructure, and distributed endpoints. This complexity supports demand for unified telemetry, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, security analytics, digital experience management, and automated incident response. The region also benefits from established SRE and DevOps practices that place observability directly in software-development and production workflows. AI-powered troubleshooting is becoming particularly important as enterprises deploy generative AI and autonomous software agents into customer-facing applications. Canadian organizations contribute demand through financial services, telecommunications, government, natural resources, retail, and technology operations. Vendors compete through cloud integrations, AI capabilities, enterprise agreements, security convergence, and platform consolidation.

• Europe: Germany accounts for 22.3% of the European Monitoring Tools Market, supported by its large enterprise base, industrial technology ecosystem, financial services sector, telecommunications infrastructure, and extensive hybrid IT environments. European monitoring strategies are strongly influenced by data protection, digital resilience, cybersecurity, and sovereignty requirements. Financial institutions require auditable service visibility and incident evidence, while manufacturers increasingly monitor combinations of cloud infrastructure, enterprise applications, production-support systems, and edge computing environments. The United Kingdom maintains substantial demand from banking, insurance, telecom, technology, retail, and public services. France has strong adoption across government, finance, transportation, telecom, and industrial operations. Nordic enterprises contribute through cloud adoption and digital-service maturity. European organizations frequently evaluate monitoring tools based on interoperability, self-management options, data residency, access controls, security architecture, and support for hybrid deployment. OpenTelemetry adoption also aligns with European demand for portable instrumentation and reduced dependence on proprietary collection layers.

• Asia-Pacific: China represents 61.7% of the Asia-Pacific Monitoring Tools Market within the cited regional dataset, supported by its large digital economy, cloud ecosystem, telecommunications infrastructure, manufacturing base, financial platforms, and e-commerce activity. India contributes through cloud migration, software services, digital financial platforms, telecommunications expansion, enterprise modernization, and a large technology workforce. Japan maintains strong demand from financial services, manufacturing, telecom, retail, and large corporate IT environments, while South Korea combines advanced broadband infrastructure with digital commerce and technology-intensive industries. ASEAN countries are increasing monitoring adoption as enterprises modernize applications and expand regional cloud deployments. Australia and New Zealand contribute demand from banking, government, telecom, mining, retail, and digital services. Asia-Pacific buyers increasingly prioritize scalable cloud monitoring, container observability, application performance, AI-driven incident analysis, and cost-efficient telemetry architectures. Local data requirements and diverse infrastructure maturity create opportunities for flexible deployment models and regional service partners.

• Middle East & Africa: Saudi Arabia holds 38.4% of the Middle East & Africa Monitoring Tools Market within the cited regional assessment, supported by digital-government programs, financial modernization, telecommunications investment, smart infrastructure, cloud adoption, and large enterprise technology projects. The United Arab Emirates also supports monitoring adoption through cloud infrastructure, digital banking, aviation, logistics, government services, retail, hospitality, and smart-city programs. South Africa remains a key African enterprise technology market with demand from banking, telecom, mining, retail, and public-sector operations. Monitoring adoption across the wider region is increasingly linked to managed services because organizations may require external expertise for deployment, integration, security, and continuous operations. Cloud-first monitoring platforms can reduce infrastructure requirements for new digital projects, while edge-capable solutions are relevant to utilities, telecom networks, transportation, industrial facilities, and geographically distributed assets. Vendors with regional partners, local support, flexible deployment options, and strong cloud integrations are positioned to capture expanding demand.

Competitive Landscape

The Monitoring Tools Market has a moderately fragmented competitive structure combining hyperscale cloud providers, large enterprise software companies, dedicated observability vendors, network-monitoring specialists, open-source ecosystems, and managed-service providers. The top five vendors collectively represented an estimated 41% of the global IT monitoring tools market, leaving substantial competitive space for specialist platforms and emerging suppliers.

Microsoft, AWS, and Google benefit from direct integration with their cloud ecosystems. Cisco combines networking, digital experience, security, and Splunk observability capabilities. IBM competes through enterprise observability and application-performance technologies, while Datadog, Dynatrace, and New Relic focus heavily on cloud-native full-stack observability.

SolarWinds maintains a substantial installed base across infrastructure, network, database, and hybrid IT monitoring. NETSCOUT specializes in service assurance and network-performance visibility, while LogicMonitor emphasizes SaaS infrastructure observability. Paessler, Zabbix, and Nagios remain important in infrastructure monitoring and flexible deployment environments.

Competition increasingly centers on AI agents, OpenTelemetry support, unified data models, security-observability convergence, digital experience, telemetry cost controls, integrations, automated remediation, and AI-workload monitoring. Product breadth is becoming increasingly important as enterprise buyers consolidate point tools into fewer operational platforms.

List of Top Monitoring Tools Companies

• Microsoft Corporation (U.S.)

• Amazon Web Services (U.S.)

• Google LLC (U.S.)

• IBM Corporation (U.S.)

• Cisco Systems, Inc. (U.S.)

• Dynatrace, Inc. (U.S.)

• Datadog, Inc. (U.S.)

• SolarWinds Corporation (U.S.)

• Splunk Inc. (U.S.)

• NETSCOUT Systems, Inc. (U.S.)

• New Relic, Inc. (U.S.)

• LogicMonitor, Inc. (U.S.)

• Paessler AG (Germany)

• Zabbix LLC (Latvia)

• Nagios Enterprises (U.S.)

Leading Companies by Market Share

• Datadog, Inc.: Datadog held an estimated 18.4% share within the cited observability-tool competitive dataset, supported by its unified infrastructure monitoring, APM, logs, digital experience, cloud security, database monitoring, and AI-assisted operational capabilities.

• New Relic, Inc.: New Relic held an estimated 12.7% share within the same competitive dataset, supported by its full-stack telemetry platform, intelligent observability capabilities, application monitoring, digital experience products, and expanding agentic-AI functionality.

Investment Trends & Opportunities

Investment in the Monitoring Tools Market is increasingly directed toward AI automation, OpenTelemetry infrastructure, unified observability platforms, telemetry optimization, security convergence, and AI-system monitoring. Enterprise buyers are allocating greater strategic importance to open standards because they reduce dependence on proprietary instrumentation and preserve flexibility across monitoring backends. In the latest observability survey, 47% of respondents reported increased investment in OpenTelemetry compared with the prior year.

Vendor investment is concentrating on autonomous incident investigation, topology-aware causal analysis, conversational diagnostics, data-observability extensions, digital experience, agent monitoring, and integrated remediation. Acquisitions are also being used to broaden observability platforms into adjacent technical domains such as data quality, experimentation, incident response, and security.

Another opportunity lies in telemetry governance. Customers want monitoring systems that provide granular usage visibility, intelligent sampling, archive tiers, pipeline filtering, and policies that control high-volume data without eliminating diagnostic context. Vendors that demonstrate predictable consumption models can improve competitiveness.

Channel investment is equally important. Systems integrators, managed service providers, cloud marketplaces, and technology alliances help monitoring suppliers reach organizations without dedicated observability engineering teams. AI infrastructure creates an additional investment category as enterprises require monitoring of models, agents, prompts, evaluations, inference performance, application dependencies, and business outcomes within a unified operational framework.

Product Innovation & Development

Product innovation in the Monitoring Tools Market is moving rapidly toward autonomous operations. Modern platforms no longer focus only on collecting telemetry and generating alerts. They increasingly analyze dependencies, assess service health, generate incident hypotheses, summarize operational context, recommend fixes, and connect remediation actions with development and collaboration systems.

AI application monitoring is another major development area. Microsoft reported improvements that reduced monitored-agent telemetry pipeline latency to 7.5 seconds at the stated performance threshold, illustrating the engineering focus on near-real-time visibility for agentic workloads. Vendors are also introducing agent fleet views, prompt and response inspection, AI evaluation integration, token tracking, model-performance diagnostics, and tracing across agent workflows.

Digital experience monitoring is becoming more tightly connected to backend observability. Platforms correlate browser activity, mobile sessions, synthetic tests, application traces, infrastructure signals, and business transactions so teams can identify where technical failures affect user journeys.

OpenTelemetry remains central to product development because buyers increasingly demand vendor-neutral instrumentation. Suppliers are improving collector management, automatic instrumentation, telemetry routing, schema handling, and multi-backend integrations. Other development priorities include intelligent log analytics, real-time topology, database observability, network intelligence, carbon optimization, security analytics, streaming-video monitoring, and observability for AI-generated applications.

Recent Developments (2023–2026)

• In June 2026, Microsoft expanded Azure Monitor with dedicated capabilities for observing AI agents, adding faster telemetry ingestion, fleet-level visibility, evaluation workflows, deeper debugging, and standardized instrumentation across supported agent frameworks.

• In April 2026, SolarWinds launched SW1 as an agentic AI teammate designed to automate IT operational tasks and move monitoring workflows toward autonomous orchestration.

• In April 2026, Datadog launched Datadog Experiments to connect application observability with controlled product experimentation and measure how software changes affect user behavior and technical performance.

• In February 2026, New Relic introduced its Agentic Platform in preview as a no-code environment for building, operating, evaluating, and governing customized AI agents within observability workflows.

• In December 2025, Datadog released Bits AI SRE for general availability, enabling autonomous alert investigation using telemetry, system architecture, runbooks, and operational context to identify likely root causes.

Scope of the Monitoring Tools Market Report

The Monitoring Tools Market report covers software platforms and associated services used to collect, analyze, correlate, visualize, and act on operational telemetry generated by applications, infrastructure, networks, cloud environments, databases, logs, security systems, and digital user experiences. The scope includes commercial monitoring platforms, SaaS observability services, enterprise monitoring software, and professional or managed services associated with deployment and operation.

Component coverage includes solutions and services. Solutions are assessed across infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, security/log and SIEM capabilities, and digital experience monitoring. Service coverage includes implementation, integration, configuration, migration, optimization, technical support, training, and managed monitoring functions.

Deployment analysis covers cloud and on-premises operating models, including hybrid environments where monitoring consoles connect telemetry from multiple infrastructure types. Organization analysis evaluates large enterprises and SMEs based on monitoring complexity, deployment requirements, purchasing behavior, technical resources, and adoption patterns.

End-user coverage includes IT and telecom, BFSI, retail and e-commerce, healthcare, media and entertainment, energy and utilities, and government and public-sector organizations. Regional coverage evaluates North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East & Africa, and other relevant markets while considering cloud maturity, regulation, digital infrastructure, technology investment, and vendor presence.

The report also examines AI-powered observability, OpenTelemetry, tool consolidation, telemetry economics, digital experience monitoring, security convergence, competitive positioning, product innovation, strategic partnerships, acquisitions, managed services, and emerging monitoring requirements for AI applications and autonomous software agents.