Before we can talk about the nuts and bolts of cloud transformation, it’s important to make the distinction from digital transformation. The two are often conflated, and while they are related, they are not the same—the cloud is the enabler of digital transformation. If you’re starting from scratch, cloud-native is the way to go.

Anything bad that can happen — will happen. This old adage applies 100% to the technology industry, where crashes and outages are far more common than the sales and marketing teams would want us to think. However, DevOps engineers that deal with infrastructure know how hard it is to ensure everything works as intended all of the time — and to configure monitoring that actually keeps track of a system’s health and helps prevent crashes and downtime.

As more organizations move to the cloud, the volume of machine generated data has grown exponentially and is increasingly important for many teams. Software engineers and SREs rely on logs to develop new applications and troubleshoot existing apps to meet reliability targets. Security operators depend on logs to find and address threats and meet compliance needs. And well structured logs provide invaluable insight that can fuel business growth.

SCOM isn’t only powerful when it comes to monitoring on-prem infrastructure, but it has also come a long way when it comes to monitoring your Azure resources. Microsoft offers a great Management Pack for monitoring Azure resources which has been through a few iterations and has only become better with each one.