Since 2015, the introduction of various Cloud-Native technologies has led to massive shifts in application development, delivery, and operations. This has led to a new competitive dynamic — rather than larger companies beating smaller companies, faster companies are beating their slower competitors.
As software and infrastructure blurred, two competing constants emerged:
- Monitoring application performance in production is an absolute requirement to ensure business success
- Legacy Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools face challenges gaining visibility into modern applications
Thus, the concept of Observability (in many forms) emerged as organizations grappled with the need to accelerate development and delivery while maintaining the levels of visibility IT Ops teams had come to expect from APM tools. But Observability has its own challenges, including many of the same roadblocks faced by the legacy APM tools. Speedy, flexible application delivery organizations (Dev, Ops, DevOps, SREs, etc.) needed the entire world of cloud-native technologies. To get it, they needed a comprehensive approach to Observability that leverages the best practices of developer-driven visibility and modern APM solutions.