Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Kubernetes has emerged the de facto container orchestration technology, and an integral technology in the cloud native movement. Cloud native brings speed, elasticity, and agility to software development, but also increases the complexity — with hundreds of microservices on thousands (or millions) of containers, running in ephemeral and disposable pods. Monitoring such a complex, distributed, transient system is challenging, and at the same time very critical.

Around the world, operations teams are working to automate their monitoring and alerting workflows, looking to reduce the time they spend on rote operational work (what we call “toil”), so they can spend more time on valuable work. For instance, Google’s Site Reliability Engineering organization aims to keep toil below 50% of an SRE’s time, freeing them up to work on more impactful engineering projects.

Most IT and business leaders know that despite the economic and human disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital transformation will ultimately speed up, not slow down. The immediate challenges of the pandemic have led companies to find innovative ways to get things done, relying on data-driven decisions and technologies.

The cloud has become ubiquitous in all we do, and the line between the perimeter and the cloud continues to shrink as most enterprise organizations are looking to shift their cloud strategy to a multi-cloud approach. Moving to the cloud comes with plenty of benefits like performance optimization, improved reliability and overall cost savings, but cloud adoption is not without its risks and challenges.