Enterprise monitoring tools have traditionally paid attention to the performance of monolithic applications hosted on physical and virtual infrastructure resources. The adoption of cloud native and microservices architectures has brought greater focus to end-user experiences delivered by web applications across different global locations. The bar for a great digital customer experience has never been higher.

To little surprise, online spending in the U.S. has grown 40% since the onset of quarantines in March. A similar trend has played out in other countries: in the UK, online retail spending reached a record high of 30% of total sales in April, according to the Office of National Statistics. If there was ever a solid reason to invest in technologies and people to improve customer experiences (both online and offline) it’s Covid-19.

In the first quarter of 2020, enterprises spent $29 billion on public cloud infrastructure, an increase of 37% over the previous year. While the global economy was battered by the coronavirus pandemic, organizations still rushed to accelerate digital transformation and ensure business continuity with hyperscale infrastructure.

For IT professionals, an enduring outage is one of the worst things that can happen. There goes your credibility, and here comes the executive team enraged and impatient. Now of course, given the distributed, multi-sourced nature of IT infrastructure, some outages are simply not preventable. The details are still emerging from the June 9th outage on IBM Cloud. ITPro Today interviewed Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti for some mitigation advice.

Neil is Principal Product Manager for Event Management and Automation at OpsRamp. He is a seasoned IT Operations Management veteran with nearly 30 years experience at large enterprises. He discusses the evolution of this critical infrastructure management software market.