If you’re responsible for application performance and availability, you know how hard it can be to see it through the eyes of your customers and end users. We think that’s really going to change with last week’s introduction of Stackdriver Service Monitoring, a new tool for monitoring how your customers perceive your applications, and that then lets you drill down to the underlying infrastructure when there’s a problem.

Like all good IT organizations, you religiously measure the performance and availability of your services and applications. But if those apps run in the cloud, critical components are often delivered by a third party or the cloud provider. In the case of a service disruption or degraded performance, how do you know what the problem is—your code, the network, or the provider? And, if the problem is with the service provider, how do you convince them to take action as quickly as possible?