If you’ve been paying attention, you know that although collecting and reviewing metrics and logs is a core part of running a stable and successful service, access to raw events and the ability to search and pivot on any dimension of your production environment, no matter how high-cardinality, is what will help your team debug and troubleshoot new problems and outages more quickly.

Achieving optimal performance can be challenging when you depend on separate platforms to monitor service health and to manage your logs. When data about your systems is spread across multiple platforms, investigating issues—and ultimately resolving them—takes longer and requires expertise with more tools. It takes more effort to identify real customer impact, as well as to verify that your responses to an incident are having the desired effect.

In today’s hyper-connected world, a company’s differentiation is completely dependent upon delivering a better customer experience, at scale, and at a lower cost than the competition. This is no easy feat, and involves a combination of many things, particularly adopting new technologies and architectures, as well as making better use of data and analytics.

Imagine that you are tasked with architecting your mission-critical cloud application. Or migrating your on-premises app to the cloud. And you ask yourself “how do the cloud savvy companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Adobe, SalesForce, etc. build and manage their modern applications?”