28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 4

APMdigest asked experts from across the industry – including consultants, analysts and the leading vendors – for recommendations on the best way to ensure application performance in the hybrid cloud. Part 4 covers tools that help you leverage performance data.

Start with 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 1

Start with 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 2

Start with 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 3

17. AUTOMATED ALERT CORRELATION

Hybrid cloud brings an unmatched level of fragmentation and complexity, compounded by modernization in application development - with the uptake of continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, containerization, and the use of micro-services. This exacerbates an already painful problem of the inability to scale manual processes for incident detection, investigation and collaboration in order to keep up with the growing volume of alerts. Automated alert correlation, that delivers enriched and actionable insight into incidents, is the need of the hour. This bridge between the gap of machine generated alerts and human understanding is the key to ensuring application performance with faster time to resolution.
Mala Ramakrishnan
Head of Product Marketing, BigPanda

18. SINGLE PANE OF GLASS

A solution that seamlessly monitors applications across hybrid environments is a necessity. Only a single pane of glass can equip IT teams with the insights they need to plan for capacity, release apps and to monitor applications that run on distributed production environments.
Krishnan Badrinarayanan
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Riverbed

Create greater gravity around a single management console. Enterprises need to extend real-time performance analytics and IT efficiencies beyond conventional on-premise orthodoxies to include the public cloud resources while at the same time assuring service delivery quality and self-healing functions across conventional infrastructure silos.
Atchison Frazer
VP of Marketing, Xangati

With both on-premises and cloud resources to manage in a hybrid IT environment, a monitoring toolset that quickly surfaces a single point of truth across those platforms is essential and will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of monitoring as a discipline. The normalization of utilization metrics, saturation alerts and error events from applications, regardless of their location, enables a more efficient approach to remediation, troubleshooting and optimization.
Kong Yang
Head Geek, SolarWinds

19. ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS

The most important word for organizations building out a hybrid cloud is "anticipation." Issues that threaten performance, security, and service availability are inevitable, and balancing the clear benefits of hybrid clouds — tailoring the solution to the need, lower costs, and improved manageability — are the challenges: hybrid clouds typically present a broader attack surface and have more PFPs ("Potential Failure Points") than less complex systems. Preparing for – rather than reacting to – these issues is cost effective and leads to a faster MTTR ("Mean Time To Resolution") for both performance and security issues. How? Enhancing monitoring and investigation capabilities, with a particular emphasis on forensics, the process of getting quickly to root cause. Application, network, and security forensics should all be in place and operational before a problem occurs, not after, for any organization building out a hybrid cloud.
Mandana Javaheri
CTO, Savvius

20. DEPLOYMENT AUTOMATION FOR MULTIPLE OPEN SOURCE MONITORING APPS

Automation is the best way to ensure app performance in any hybrid cloud environment. Companies should look for solutions that can automate the deployment of a wide range of open source Big Data applications to allow for optimal flexibility in the use of application platforms. One such category of open source applications allows businesses to monitor application performance. This type of modern open source software and application monitoring technology can be supported on many different platforms, making it hybrid-cloud compatible. Automation eliminates the time consuming and error-prone manual system engineering of these open source distributed systems. Because different open source tools have different degrees of complexity, automation commoditizes this “heavy lifting” and allows a greater audience of perspective users to take advantage of more of these tools. Its no longer just the “big data elite” that can take advantage of all of the tools in the market today.
Dave Hirko
Managing Partner, Stackspace

21. VM LOAD BALANCING AND MONITORING

Virtual machines that are overloaded with traffic can't efficiently run applications in the hybrid cloud, leading to app lag times and performance delays. Load balancing tools can effectively distribute day traffic to VMs. and monitoring gives IT teams complete, easy visibility into the traffic on each VM, along with real-time reports on application delivery. By monitoring the traffic, you can eliminate any guesswork relative to app performance, wherever you're deploying.
Simon Taylor
SVP and GM, Comtrade System Software and Tools

Read 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 5, covering approaches you might not have thought about.

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28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 4

APMdigest asked experts from across the industry – including consultants, analysts and the leading vendors – for recommendations on the best way to ensure application performance in the hybrid cloud. Part 4 covers tools that help you leverage performance data.

Start with 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 1

Start with 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 2

Start with 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 3

17. AUTOMATED ALERT CORRELATION

Hybrid cloud brings an unmatched level of fragmentation and complexity, compounded by modernization in application development - with the uptake of continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, containerization, and the use of micro-services. This exacerbates an already painful problem of the inability to scale manual processes for incident detection, investigation and collaboration in order to keep up with the growing volume of alerts. Automated alert correlation, that delivers enriched and actionable insight into incidents, is the need of the hour. This bridge between the gap of machine generated alerts and human understanding is the key to ensuring application performance with faster time to resolution.
Mala Ramakrishnan
Head of Product Marketing, BigPanda

18. SINGLE PANE OF GLASS

A solution that seamlessly monitors applications across hybrid environments is a necessity. Only a single pane of glass can equip IT teams with the insights they need to plan for capacity, release apps and to monitor applications that run on distributed production environments.
Krishnan Badrinarayanan
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Riverbed

Create greater gravity around a single management console. Enterprises need to extend real-time performance analytics and IT efficiencies beyond conventional on-premise orthodoxies to include the public cloud resources while at the same time assuring service delivery quality and self-healing functions across conventional infrastructure silos.
Atchison Frazer
VP of Marketing, Xangati

With both on-premises and cloud resources to manage in a hybrid IT environment, a monitoring toolset that quickly surfaces a single point of truth across those platforms is essential and will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of monitoring as a discipline. The normalization of utilization metrics, saturation alerts and error events from applications, regardless of their location, enables a more efficient approach to remediation, troubleshooting and optimization.
Kong Yang
Head Geek, SolarWinds

19. ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS

The most important word for organizations building out a hybrid cloud is "anticipation." Issues that threaten performance, security, and service availability are inevitable, and balancing the clear benefits of hybrid clouds — tailoring the solution to the need, lower costs, and improved manageability — are the challenges: hybrid clouds typically present a broader attack surface and have more PFPs ("Potential Failure Points") than less complex systems. Preparing for – rather than reacting to – these issues is cost effective and leads to a faster MTTR ("Mean Time To Resolution") for both performance and security issues. How? Enhancing monitoring and investigation capabilities, with a particular emphasis on forensics, the process of getting quickly to root cause. Application, network, and security forensics should all be in place and operational before a problem occurs, not after, for any organization building out a hybrid cloud.
Mandana Javaheri
CTO, Savvius

20. DEPLOYMENT AUTOMATION FOR MULTIPLE OPEN SOURCE MONITORING APPS

Automation is the best way to ensure app performance in any hybrid cloud environment. Companies should look for solutions that can automate the deployment of a wide range of open source Big Data applications to allow for optimal flexibility in the use of application platforms. One such category of open source applications allows businesses to monitor application performance. This type of modern open source software and application monitoring technology can be supported on many different platforms, making it hybrid-cloud compatible. Automation eliminates the time consuming and error-prone manual system engineering of these open source distributed systems. Because different open source tools have different degrees of complexity, automation commoditizes this “heavy lifting” and allows a greater audience of perspective users to take advantage of more of these tools. Its no longer just the “big data elite” that can take advantage of all of the tools in the market today.
Dave Hirko
Managing Partner, Stackspace

21. VM LOAD BALANCING AND MONITORING

Virtual machines that are overloaded with traffic can't efficiently run applications in the hybrid cloud, leading to app lag times and performance delays. Load balancing tools can effectively distribute day traffic to VMs. and monitoring gives IT teams complete, easy visibility into the traffic on each VM, along with real-time reports on application delivery. By monitoring the traffic, you can eliminate any guesswork relative to app performance, wherever you're deploying.
Simon Taylor
SVP and GM, Comtrade System Software and Tools

Read 28 Ways to Ensure Application Performance in the Hybrid Cloud - Part 5, covering approaches you might not have thought about.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

AI is Moving Fast, and Enterprise File Data Is Not Ready

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Move Fast Without the Usual Quality Penalty

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

When the Observability Bill Arrives for Agentic AI

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

AI is Breaking Enterprise Log Management

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

How Edge Intelligence Will Redefine Secure Connectivity

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

Production Inference Shifts Decisively to Private Cloud

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

Why DevOps Teams Build GenAI Tooling While Most Organizations Still Rely on Manual Monitoring

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Why Cloud Reliability Comes Down to People and How to Improve It

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

Why IT Keeps Getting Handed an AI Training Problem It Can't Solve Alone

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

Bringing IBM i Into the Modern Observability Stack: The Missing Piece of Enterprise AIOps

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...