Today, organizations are moving toward distributed systems to provide top-notch application services. This trend has made both observability and monitoring essential practices. As observability and monitoring are often used interchangeably, many people tend to get confused. It’s crucial to understand the difference between the two to use the right approach for a given scenario.

Like many companies, Stack Overflow is trying to get out of the business of running our architecture in our own data centers; instead, we want to offload some of the more mundane parts of system administration to a cloud service offering like Azure. I’m going to cut to the chase for the purpose of this article and concede we’ve already decided on Azure for the majority of our infrastructure and, most importantly to me, our databases.

As a data professional, I often think about all the things around me generating data and consider where this data is ultimately being used. Have you ever taken a minute to consider exactly how much data is being generated at any point in time? I love collecting data and looking at ways it can be used and living in a “smart” home with appliances logging and reporting usage patterns certainly provides a lot of opportunities.

At SolarWinds, we focus on helping our customers accelerate their business transformation through solutions designed to be simple, powerful, and secure. Over the past couple of years, we’ve made significant investments in our security and software build process with the goal of leading the industry in cyber resiliency. Recently, I spoke at the VentureBeat Intelligent Security Summit on the topic of Becoming Secure by Design with CrowdStrike Vice President of Intelligence Adam Meyers.

I’m frequently asked about why customers select SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability. Given the wide variety of options available, I thought it would be helpful to put together a compilation of what customers have told us as their top reasons for making the switch.

Both DevOps and ITIL are two popular frameworks in the IT space and get a lot of attention. However, while both are frameworks, DevOps is more of a collaboration method and shift in thinking vs. ITIL, which is a set of detailed guidelines for IT service management. You can be fairly flexible when it comes to your DevOps implementation in your organization, ITIL is more rigid, with very prescriptive guidance necessary for it to earn the label of ITIL.

This past October, we had the pleasure of meeting with 11 IT leaders from diverse industries—including healthcare, financial services, education, telecom, logistics, and technology— as part of our inaugural SolarWinds Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting. The CAB is an exciting initiative for both myself, and our GVP of Customer Success, Anselm Peng.

Application engineers play a crucial role in bridging customer needs and the efforts of application development teams. Applications are becoming more complex—businesses are seeking to deliver more services while the software engineering components underlying those them are expanding and interacting in new ways. This combination of factors is driving the need for application engineers who can understand both the business and the technical aspects of applications.

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) describes a framework for delivering IT services according to best practices, including best practices for what’s known as knowledge management. Knowledge management, which includes being able to gather, store, and share IT knowledge, is critical for IT service management (ITSM).

As organizations increasingly adopt more devices, applications, and other technologies, IT teams addressing problems before they arise is a vital part of avoiding downtime, maintaining productivity, and ultimately growing revenue. While a reactive approach has traditionally been good enough, the most successful organizations are increasingly taking proactive measures to ensure employees always have access to what they need with little or no downtime.