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Mark: One of the key pieces of research we're doing lately is around distributed cloud. Meaning that not everything, Bob, is cloud native, not everything is on prem, but it's really creating this developer-ready infrastructure with modern applications. One of the things is about, okay, now that, that is happening, how do I monitor, capture intelligence observability into that environment?

What are some of the things that you're seeing, are either a challenge or a priority with a lot of the clients that you speak with?

Bob: Yeah, that's a great point, Mark. The interesting piece is with modern applications evolving and these microservices and container-based environments, they are far more dynamic than the virtual environments that proceeded them which everyone called dynamic. And the big transition that we're seeing is that it's really about shifting from that monitoring environment where you knew what you wanted to monitor and you set things, specifically metrics that you wanted to collect, and you could do so every five minutes or so.

The interesting piece is that we moved to this modern application environment, we don't always know what we want to collect and the environment could be spinning up services for seconds. So, the two big things with observability is you've got to have much more granular data collection, and there's going to be a lot more of it. People commonly talk about metrics, events, logs, and traces that are being collected, also collecting data from outside so they can provide correlation in context to those data points.

But the big piece right now that people are challenged with is how do I get all that data in and how do I correlate it in a real time to give me meaningful data, and how am I able to go and really search for those highly distributed environments? So, across my on premises, across multiple clouds, across the edge, collect all that data, correlate it, and give me the ability to troubleshoot, and design, and figure out what's going on in that environment.

And that's really where that observability piece is coming into play. And a lot of organizations are just getting started with this.

Mark: Yeah, no, it makes so much sense. I mean, you would think that cloud, in general, kind of helped solve things, certainly people are doing it, but we see, right, with our research, 75% of people are saying, "Hey, IT is more complex than ever." We also would think that, you know, as developers kind of hand over to IT operation, there's a little bit of what's going on. And that's certainly what our research is going to focus on here.

So, when we look at distributed cloud and observability, it's really kind of understanding kind of what are those organizational dynamics? Where do challenges exist? What metrics are most important? How are they doing remediation through, you know, performance kind of metrics? Are they using existing tools, new tools, all things that I'm sure you're keen to capture and we'll be looking at in the research as well, Bob, right?

Bob: Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be all about, how do I transition from my legacy tools into these modern ones? How do I ensure complete visibility across that hybrid environment that I've got going? So, a lot of complexity, as you mentioned. And so, we need sophisticated tools and solutions to be able to pull all that together. And that's what we want to go find out is how organizations are doing that and provide some insights for everyone.

Mark: Yeah, no, perfect, Bob. And so, if anybody's interested, please, contact myself or Bob to learn more about our "Distributed Cloud Research" series we'll be doing over the course of the remainder of '21 and into 2022.