What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 4

APMdigest asked experts from across the IT industry for their opinions on what IT departments should be monitoring to ensure digital performance. Part 4 covers the infrastructure, including the cloud and the network.

Start with What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 1

Start with What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 2

Start with What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 3

DATA

Data performance monitoring is the most important aspect to ensure digital performance. Data transformed into content will dictate the end user experience. Data represented as text, images, video or voxels in extended reality requires continual monitoring to ensure quality of experience. IT departments can determine the amount of investment required to modify the network and application components based upon data performance. Data visualization formats can also be modified to function on the status quo infrastructure until the upgrade investments are in place.
Dos Dosanjh
Director, Technical Marketing, Quali

Monitor slow flow data - collected by standard discovery tools to map changes in network, apps, data, location or users. And fast flow data - collected by log analyzers, webcasters, and real time discovery to overlay changes to dependency map.
Jeanne Morain
Author and Strategist, iSpeak Cloud

BIG DATA TECHNOLOGIES

Organizations need to be able to monitor the big data technology that modern applications are increasingly reliant upon. These apps need fast access to technologies such as Hadoop, Kafka, Spark and Hbase, in order to make business critical decisions across all verticals, including financial services, retail, manufacturing, healthcare and telecom. For example, in finance, fraud detection leverages streaming data from systems like Kafka and Spark Streaming to collect and process information in order to detect any irregular patterns and prevent fraudulent transactions. Streaming apps like these have complex distributed architectures and produce massive volumes of data that is constantly changing. This makes them susceptible to performance issues, jeopardizing the important business process they were supporting. It's critical that enterprises monitor these modern data apps with a strong application performance management (APM) platform that has end-to-end observability and AI-driven automation at the core.
Kunal Agarwal
CEO, Unravel Data

MAINFRAME

Ever since servers of all types began processing transactions between businesses and the web/mobile devices, the need for millisecond performance between the end-user and the mainframe back-end data repository has existed. Along this path, there are numerous moving parts that contribute to a delightful or disastrous user experience. Focus must be given to monitoring mainframe performance as most web and mobile applications end with a purchase, a bank account deposit, or some exchange that ultimately takes place on a back-end mainframe.
Kelly Vogt
Performance Consultant, Compuware

MIDDLEWARE

One component that people often miss: the middleware. Whether it be on-premises ESBs, cloud-based iPaaS, or some combination, if the middleware has an issue, it can adversely impact the customer experience.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx

INTERACTIONS BETWEEN CLOUDS

As organizations increasingly adopt multi-cloud strategies, there's a growing need to monitor not just the performance (speed, reliability) of individual cloud infrastructures themselves, but also the interactions between these platforms. When deploying a multi-cloud environment, fast, reliable interoperability between multiple cloud regions and providers can be the key to strong performance for entire end-to-end componentized applications.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint

NETWORK

Digital performance is a full-stack affair, so it's essential to monitor the network at the wire level all the way to the applications and real user experience.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx

The most important metric for IT teams to monitor is the performance of the network.
Douglas Roberts
VP and General Manager, Viavi Enterprise and Cloud Business Unit

Digital performance monitoring requires complete network visibility to expose hidden problems and soon-to-be problems.
Keith Bromley
Senior Manager, Solutions Marketing, Ixia Solutions Group a Keysight Technologies business

Networks can be needy: They often require constant attention to ensure continuous uptime and properly defend against cyberattacks. Traditional symptom-based SNMP monitoring isn't enough to ensure (or enhance) digital performance – IT teams need to leverage proactive network monitoring and contextualized visibility. Waiting for a problem to occur and then trying to track down the source with an outdated map or protocols results in more time troubleshooting and increased MTTR, leaving less time and brain space for making strategic updates or otherwise optimizing digital performance. Instead of always operating in crisis mode, network teams need to employ network automation to continuously monitor for underlying faults, identify problems in context to speed recovery and proactively enforce best practices.
Jason Baudreau
Product Specialist, NetBrain

SD-WAN

Ensuring digital performance today can be a proxy for keeping employees productive. When networks are slow, people are slow. The adoption of SD-WAN is enticing for large enterprises seeking to lower costs or increase flexibility for remote locations, but it's not a silver bullet and what's missing from this discussion is end-to-end performance baselining. SD-WAN has no effect on issues outside of the WAN and the application delivery path is constantly changing so monitoring before, during, and after SD-WAN deployment across the entire connection is essential to finding and fixing issues that degrade user experience no matter where the issue occurs.
Sean Armstrong
VP of Product, AppNeta

Read What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 5, the final installment, with some recommendations you may not have thought about.

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What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 4

APMdigest asked experts from across the IT industry for their opinions on what IT departments should be monitoring to ensure digital performance. Part 4 covers the infrastructure, including the cloud and the network.

Start with What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 1

Start with What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 2

Start with What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 3

DATA

Data performance monitoring is the most important aspect to ensure digital performance. Data transformed into content will dictate the end user experience. Data represented as text, images, video or voxels in extended reality requires continual monitoring to ensure quality of experience. IT departments can determine the amount of investment required to modify the network and application components based upon data performance. Data visualization formats can also be modified to function on the status quo infrastructure until the upgrade investments are in place.
Dos Dosanjh
Director, Technical Marketing, Quali

Monitor slow flow data - collected by standard discovery tools to map changes in network, apps, data, location or users. And fast flow data - collected by log analyzers, webcasters, and real time discovery to overlay changes to dependency map.
Jeanne Morain
Author and Strategist, iSpeak Cloud

BIG DATA TECHNOLOGIES

Organizations need to be able to monitor the big data technology that modern applications are increasingly reliant upon. These apps need fast access to technologies such as Hadoop, Kafka, Spark and Hbase, in order to make business critical decisions across all verticals, including financial services, retail, manufacturing, healthcare and telecom. For example, in finance, fraud detection leverages streaming data from systems like Kafka and Spark Streaming to collect and process information in order to detect any irregular patterns and prevent fraudulent transactions. Streaming apps like these have complex distributed architectures and produce massive volumes of data that is constantly changing. This makes them susceptible to performance issues, jeopardizing the important business process they were supporting. It's critical that enterprises monitor these modern data apps with a strong application performance management (APM) platform that has end-to-end observability and AI-driven automation at the core.
Kunal Agarwal
CEO, Unravel Data

MAINFRAME

Ever since servers of all types began processing transactions between businesses and the web/mobile devices, the need for millisecond performance between the end-user and the mainframe back-end data repository has existed. Along this path, there are numerous moving parts that contribute to a delightful or disastrous user experience. Focus must be given to monitoring mainframe performance as most web and mobile applications end with a purchase, a bank account deposit, or some exchange that ultimately takes place on a back-end mainframe.
Kelly Vogt
Performance Consultant, Compuware

MIDDLEWARE

One component that people often miss: the middleware. Whether it be on-premises ESBs, cloud-based iPaaS, or some combination, if the middleware has an issue, it can adversely impact the customer experience.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx

INTERACTIONS BETWEEN CLOUDS

As organizations increasingly adopt multi-cloud strategies, there's a growing need to monitor not just the performance (speed, reliability) of individual cloud infrastructures themselves, but also the interactions between these platforms. When deploying a multi-cloud environment, fast, reliable interoperability between multiple cloud regions and providers can be the key to strong performance for entire end-to-end componentized applications.
Mehdi Daoudi
CEO and Founder, Catchpoint

NETWORK

Digital performance is a full-stack affair, so it's essential to monitor the network at the wire level all the way to the applications and real user experience.
Jason Bloomberg
President, Intellyx

The most important metric for IT teams to monitor is the performance of the network.
Douglas Roberts
VP and General Manager, Viavi Enterprise and Cloud Business Unit

Digital performance monitoring requires complete network visibility to expose hidden problems and soon-to-be problems.
Keith Bromley
Senior Manager, Solutions Marketing, Ixia Solutions Group a Keysight Technologies business

Networks can be needy: They often require constant attention to ensure continuous uptime and properly defend against cyberattacks. Traditional symptom-based SNMP monitoring isn't enough to ensure (or enhance) digital performance – IT teams need to leverage proactive network monitoring and contextualized visibility. Waiting for a problem to occur and then trying to track down the source with an outdated map or protocols results in more time troubleshooting and increased MTTR, leaving less time and brain space for making strategic updates or otherwise optimizing digital performance. Instead of always operating in crisis mode, network teams need to employ network automation to continuously monitor for underlying faults, identify problems in context to speed recovery and proactively enforce best practices.
Jason Baudreau
Product Specialist, NetBrain

SD-WAN

Ensuring digital performance today can be a proxy for keeping employees productive. When networks are slow, people are slow. The adoption of SD-WAN is enticing for large enterprises seeking to lower costs or increase flexibility for remote locations, but it's not a silver bullet and what's missing from this discussion is end-to-end performance baselining. SD-WAN has no effect on issues outside of the WAN and the application delivery path is constantly changing so monitoring before, during, and after SD-WAN deployment across the entire connection is essential to finding and fixing issues that degrade user experience no matter where the issue occurs.
Sean Armstrong
VP of Product, AppNeta

Read What You Should Be Monitoring to Ensure Digital Performance - Part 5, the final installment, with some recommendations you may not have thought about.

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 24: Network Observability Tool Sprawl

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

Capacity Isn't a Guess: Observability-Driven Sizing for On-Prem Databases

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

5 Security Principles Every Entrepreneur Should Apply to Leadership

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Signs It May Be Time to Reassess Your IT Infrastructure Strategy

Many organizations assumed their infrastructure strategy was settled. It had been implemented, optimized and built into long-term plans. Recent changes in technology and vendor consolidation are forcing a second look. Cloud outages and licensing changes have exposed how much dependency exists on a small number of platforms. As a result, organizations are reevaluating whether those decisions still hold up under current conditions ...

Enterprise Edge AI Reaches Inflection Point

Edge AI is strategically embedded in core IT and infrastructure spending across industries, according to the 2026 Edge AI Survey from ZEDEDA. The research shows that 83% of C-suite and IT executive respondents say edge AI is important to their core business strategy ...

AI Is Hitting Operational Limits

As AI adoption accelerates, operational complexity — not model intelligence — is becoming the primary barrier to reliable AI at scale, according to the State of AI Engineering 2026 from Datadog ... The report highlights a compounding complexity challenge as AI systems scale ... Around 5% of AI model requests fail in production, with nearly 60% of those failures caused by capacity limits ...

Alert Fatigue Is No Longer a Morale Problem, It's a Reliability Risk and a System Failure

For years, production operations teams have treated alert fatigue as a quality-of-life problem: something that makes on-call rotations miserable but isn't considered a direct contributor to outages. That framing doesn't capture how these systems fail, and we now have data to show why. More importantly, it's now clear alert fatigue is a symptom of a deeper issue: production systems have outgrown the current operational approaches ...

Most Enterprises Think They Can Switch AI Vendors in a Month ... Most Who've Tried Couldn't

I was on a customer call last fall when an enterprise architect said something I haven't been able to shake. Her team had just spent four months trying to swap one AI vendor for another. The original plan said three weeks. "We didn't switch vendors," she told me. "We rebuilt half our integrations and discovered what we'd actually been depending on." Most enterprise leaders don't expect that to be the experience ...

Your Observability Stack Has a Telemetry Pipeline Problem

Ask any senior SRE or platform engineer what keeps them up at night, and the answer probably isn't the monitoring tool — it's the data feeding it. The proliferation of APM, observability, and AIOps platforms has created a telemetry sprawl problem that most teams manage reactively rather than architect proactively. Metrics are going to one platform. Traces routed somewhere else. Logs duplicated across multiple backends because nobody wants to be caught without them when something breaks. Every redundant stream costs money ...

Operator to Orchestrator: 80% of IT Pros See Shift in Role as AI Permeates Workflows

80% of respondents agree that the IT role is shifting from operators to orchestrators, according to the 2026 IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous IT from SolarWinds ...