It’s relatively easy to study the immediate impact of new releases by analyzing short-term changes in user behavior or system activity. However, this information doesn’t tell you much about the long-term viability of your application, which depends less on the novelty of major application updates and more on sustained usability.

Complex systems require many different monitors to assess the health of their infrastructure and applications, creating a wealth of alerts that can be hard to track. Due to a lack of effective triage processes, many organizations page engineers for every alert that comes in, making it difficult to separate false positives from issues that actually require immediate attention.

Tracing provides indispensable insights into the state and performance of distributed applications, but it can often be difficult to determine the root cause or ultimate business impact of issues indicated by traces. Translating visibility of individual microservices into broader performance insights often requires drawing complex correlations between spans. This can be a laborious process, which can complicate everything from troubleshooting and triage to tracking KPIs and managing costs.

Faulty deployments and other types of erroneous changes may account for around 70% of all application outages. With the prevalence of CI/CD workflows, engineering teams make changes to their applications, services, and infrastructure all the time, which can make it difficult to trace issues to specific changes.

The Windows operating system exposes metrics such as CPU, memory, and disk usage as built-in performance counters, which provide a unified way to observe performance, state, and other high-level facets of Windows subsystems, components, and native or third-party applications. As such, Windows Performance Counters can be invaluable for monitoring resource usage and the health of your infrastructure, as well as systems your services are using.