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Monitoring as a Differentiator: Breaking Silos and Building Understanding

David Drai

Monitoring a business means monitoring an entire business – not just IT or application performance. If businesses truly care about differentiating themselves from the competition, they must approach monitoring holistically. Separate, siloed monitoring systems are quickly becoming a thing of the past.

I see time and again cloud monitoring companies working with a myopic focus on the Infrastructure area – a critical mistake. They concentrate on system health but avoid business health like the plague. Although CPU, Disk, Memory and other infrastructure KPIs are essential to maintain a healthy system, their coverage is limited and lacking an equally crucial component that drives how well a company is operating – its business. Today there is simply no excuse for having incomplete monitoring capabilities, and it is more necessary than ever to get out of monitoring siloes.

Cloud Monitoring 1.0 and the Evolution of Metrics

Monitoring infrastructure provides some visibility to overall system health by keeping machines up and running – but it is not at all adequate to determine what is occurring on the business side of a company. Infrastructure monitoring is also far too basic to keep up with updates within applications – essentially putting blinders on a company's leadership.

As it stands, infrastructure monitoring tools usually run in conjunction with other internal tools to gain an angle on the business, or analysts rely on Business Intelligence solutions that may be connected to infrastructure monitoring through internal scripts. In most cases, these 1.0 level tools require a great deal of internal development and maintenance which are difficult to scale.

In the past few years, time series metrics have been the main driver of growth in cloud monitoring systems. This approach of normalizing almost all data per a single time series representation has enabled the provision of generic solutions for many cases and different customers. Because of its rudimentary ability, it is not surprising that open source solutions are becoming so widespread among the businesses which are beginning to understand the importance of monitoring. The ability to represent all metrics in the same manner using the same dashboards and time series function sets has significantly simplified this monitoring method providing good but not fully comprehensive information.

Today's Challenges of Monitoring Business

One of the main challenges of monitoring business KPIs is that static rules and alerts are too limiting. Particularly for metrics that change per trends or seasons, static alerts are difficult to maintain because of their inherent variability. Even in the simplest cases, it is very difficult to define thresholds for thousands of metrics because it requires the user to have working knowledge of their normal range. For e-commerce companies, the holiday season is always a peak time in sales and every metric is going to behave "abnormally." It is nearly impossible for large data-driven companies, which are monitoring so much, to start making changes to reset the threshold for every single metric – talk about a nightmare.

Another challenge of monitoring so many metrics is defining rules manually especially when each metric has a different normal range. Unfortunately, it is essential that this be done to achieve effective configuration. Amazon needs to know that "Elf on a Shelf" dolls are going to sell heavily in November and that gift certificates will be sold later in the month.

Cloud Monitoring 2.0: for IT, applications AND BUSINESS

The newest generation of monitoring centralizes all company activity into a single unified solution, rather than separate solutions for IT, application, and business. This is the holistic understanding that companies have been working towards for so long – the ability to understand every metric separately and together. It is one thing to see an infrastructure anomaly on its own, but to be able to contextualize it with the correlated impact on the business affords an entirely new way to problem-solve and measure the health of a company. Beyond addressing the immediate issues this type of top-down monitoring approach offers tremendous value.

Without a smart mechanism to monitor so many rules and alerts, companies are bound to compromise what they monitor, sacrificing all for a few selected metrics. Analysts are not fortune tellers – there is no way to define what the best metrics are to monitor. This creates an inevitable delay in detection of issues, which severely limits how proactive a company can be in the varied business scenarios it faces. It also limits the granularity of the organization's visibility – bringing us back to where we were with Cloud Monitoring 1.0.

Only recently the implementation of AI in BI is enabling companies to solve challenges in monitoring. By automating the ability to differentiate between what is normal and abnormal behavior (no matter the trend or time of year) businesses finally have a chance to review a comprehensive and automatic evaluation of anomalies. With the addition of AI to monitoring, companies can differentiate themselves by how quickly they respond to changing conditions; how quickly they find bugs and glitches, how rapidly they respond to customers in crisis, and how swiftly they leverage a business opportunity triggered by a celebrity's viral Instagram post.

While companies engage with their customers in more ways than ever before, finding ways to break out of monitoring silos is going to be the key that companies use to successfully scale and compete with industry giants.

David Drai is CEO and Co-Founder of Anodot.

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Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

Monitoring as a Differentiator: Breaking Silos and Building Understanding

David Drai

Monitoring a business means monitoring an entire business – not just IT or application performance. If businesses truly care about differentiating themselves from the competition, they must approach monitoring holistically. Separate, siloed monitoring systems are quickly becoming a thing of the past.

I see time and again cloud monitoring companies working with a myopic focus on the Infrastructure area – a critical mistake. They concentrate on system health but avoid business health like the plague. Although CPU, Disk, Memory and other infrastructure KPIs are essential to maintain a healthy system, their coverage is limited and lacking an equally crucial component that drives how well a company is operating – its business. Today there is simply no excuse for having incomplete monitoring capabilities, and it is more necessary than ever to get out of monitoring siloes.

Cloud Monitoring 1.0 and the Evolution of Metrics

Monitoring infrastructure provides some visibility to overall system health by keeping machines up and running – but it is not at all adequate to determine what is occurring on the business side of a company. Infrastructure monitoring is also far too basic to keep up with updates within applications – essentially putting blinders on a company's leadership.

As it stands, infrastructure monitoring tools usually run in conjunction with other internal tools to gain an angle on the business, or analysts rely on Business Intelligence solutions that may be connected to infrastructure monitoring through internal scripts. In most cases, these 1.0 level tools require a great deal of internal development and maintenance which are difficult to scale.

In the past few years, time series metrics have been the main driver of growth in cloud monitoring systems. This approach of normalizing almost all data per a single time series representation has enabled the provision of generic solutions for many cases and different customers. Because of its rudimentary ability, it is not surprising that open source solutions are becoming so widespread among the businesses which are beginning to understand the importance of monitoring. The ability to represent all metrics in the same manner using the same dashboards and time series function sets has significantly simplified this monitoring method providing good but not fully comprehensive information.

Today's Challenges of Monitoring Business

One of the main challenges of monitoring business KPIs is that static rules and alerts are too limiting. Particularly for metrics that change per trends or seasons, static alerts are difficult to maintain because of their inherent variability. Even in the simplest cases, it is very difficult to define thresholds for thousands of metrics because it requires the user to have working knowledge of their normal range. For e-commerce companies, the holiday season is always a peak time in sales and every metric is going to behave "abnormally." It is nearly impossible for large data-driven companies, which are monitoring so much, to start making changes to reset the threshold for every single metric – talk about a nightmare.

Another challenge of monitoring so many metrics is defining rules manually especially when each metric has a different normal range. Unfortunately, it is essential that this be done to achieve effective configuration. Amazon needs to know that "Elf on a Shelf" dolls are going to sell heavily in November and that gift certificates will be sold later in the month.

Cloud Monitoring 2.0: for IT, applications AND BUSINESS

The newest generation of monitoring centralizes all company activity into a single unified solution, rather than separate solutions for IT, application, and business. This is the holistic understanding that companies have been working towards for so long – the ability to understand every metric separately and together. It is one thing to see an infrastructure anomaly on its own, but to be able to contextualize it with the correlated impact on the business affords an entirely new way to problem-solve and measure the health of a company. Beyond addressing the immediate issues this type of top-down monitoring approach offers tremendous value.

Without a smart mechanism to monitor so many rules and alerts, companies are bound to compromise what they monitor, sacrificing all for a few selected metrics. Analysts are not fortune tellers – there is no way to define what the best metrics are to monitor. This creates an inevitable delay in detection of issues, which severely limits how proactive a company can be in the varied business scenarios it faces. It also limits the granularity of the organization's visibility – bringing us back to where we were with Cloud Monitoring 1.0.

Only recently the implementation of AI in BI is enabling companies to solve challenges in monitoring. By automating the ability to differentiate between what is normal and abnormal behavior (no matter the trend or time of year) businesses finally have a chance to review a comprehensive and automatic evaluation of anomalies. With the addition of AI to monitoring, companies can differentiate themselves by how quickly they respond to changing conditions; how quickly they find bugs and glitches, how rapidly they respond to customers in crisis, and how swiftly they leverage a business opportunity triggered by a celebrity's viral Instagram post.

While companies engage with their customers in more ways than ever before, finding ways to break out of monitoring silos is going to be the key that companies use to successfully scale and compete with industry giants.

David Drai is CEO and Co-Founder of Anodot.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

An overwhelming majority of IT leaders (95%) believe the upcoming wave of AI-powered digital transformation is set to be the most impactful and intensive seen thus far, according to The Science of Productivity: AI, Adoption, And Employee Experience, a new report from Nexthink ...

Overall outage frequency and the general level of reported severity continue to decline, according to the Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute. However, cyber security incidents are on the rise and often have severe, lasting impacts ...

In March, New Relic published the State of Observability for Media and Entertainment Report to share insights, data, and analysis into the adoption and business value of observability across the media and entertainment industry. Here are six key takeaways from the report ...

Regardless of their scale, business decisions often take time, effort, and a lot of back-and-forth discussion to reach any sort of actionable conclusion ... Any means of streamlining this process and getting from complex problems to optimal solutions more efficiently and reliably is key. How can organizations optimize their decision-making to save time and reduce excess effort from those involved? ...

As enterprises accelerate their cloud adoption strategies, CIOs are routinely exceeding their cloud budgets — a concern that's about to face additional pressure from an unexpected direction: uncertainty over semiconductor tariffs. The CIO Cloud Trends Survey & Report from Azul reveals the extent continued cloud investment despite cost overruns, and how organizations are attempting to bring spending under control ...

Image
Azul

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency