It has been clear to many IT practitioners for a while now that the fundamental nature of IT infrastructure monitoring is transforming, right alongside the rest of the IT landscape. Gartner’s latest Market Guide for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools does a great job of mapping out evolving trends in the space.

2018 saw modern enterprises adopting different approaches and tools to predict and eliminate IT outages using data collection and analytics — from modeling and performance data to log, event and application data. The advancements in machine learning and AI will help DevOps and IT Ops push boundaries in 2019, enabling them to collect streaming data in real time and get insights to optimize and improve IT performance. Here are some of the trends we are observing for 2019.

Google has effectively made the discipline of site reliability engineering (SRE) a DevOps best practice by publishing two decades’ worth of lessons in keeping alive the most scalable apps on the planet. As more organizations make the shift (or “transformation,” as it were) to becoming IT organizations, the demand for reliability increases substantially for customer-facing services.

As enterprise IT organizations evaluate cloud-based services, security can be a primary concern — both in terms of the security of the customer data associated with the application as well as the potential for breaches of the customer’s IT environment. Zenoss takes a comprehensive approach to SaaS security, addressing it from both a product and process perspective, to ensure the integrity of monitoring operations.

With the new ZenPack for Kubernetes containers, Zenoss adds tremendous value to clients by integrating the monitoring of multicloud environments leveraging Kubernetes technology with any IT infrastructure an organization may use — no matter where that infrastructure is located or how it is hosted.

Most IT organizations like to think of themselves as continuously improving. The best ones constantly invest in building new skills, deploying new infrastructure, acquiring new tools, creating new processes, or even tuning what they already have in order to wring more efficiency and productivity out of their environments. Many are migrating to the cloud, as cloud service providers (or CSPs) cheerily advertise three, four or even five 9s of availability (e.g., 99.999% uptime).

Growing up in Seattle, Washington, I had access to some of the best hiking in the world. If you want take on a challenge and climb a peak, then the Cascade and Olympic mountain ranges provide a variety of journeys for everyone regardless of skill level and starting point. We were taught at a very young age that everyone needed certain “essentials” before setting out to ensure safety and success.

Modern IT environments can be dynamic and complex. IT organizations often find themselves monitoring effectively at small scale but few have implemented solutions with the flexibility and capability to operate in elastically scalable environments.

Service-centric IT organizations differentiate themselves from peers by their ability to accelerate incident resolution no matter what the organization’s priorities may be as they undertake critical transformation projects.