People have come to expect a certain level of performance from their applications, whether using a consumer application, such as a retail website, or using a business application to get their jobs done.

But most monitoring solutions have not adapted to this collapsing of the consumer and business worlds into one, making it difficult for businesses to see how their applications are presenting to customers and employees.

Twenty years ago, businesses ran all of their applications in their own data centers, behind firewalls, under their complete control. The internet was just a transport, a way for users’ machines to talk to back ends. There wasn’t business being transacted. And, the experience wasn’t great.

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Because applications were local and under company control, monitoring also was local. There was packet analysis and netflow analysis and of course data analysis.

Nik Koutsoukos, executive vice president of marketing for experience monitoring solution provider Catchpoint,  fast-forwards to today.  “I’m sitting in my condo — I work from home most of the time — and I’m using my company laptop and accessing all the applications I need as an employee. They’re in the cloud or they’re SaaS. The transport I’m using is 100% internet. I’m not using some wired infrastructure; I’m not going through some corporate firewall. My world as a consumer, and my world as an employee, have completely collapsed. It’s the same world.”

But Koutsoukos went on to say that while application architectures and deployments have evolved, monitoring tools have not. “The focus is still on local telemetry, on packet, collecting packets and data from wherever you can, while most of the applications and hosting environments and transport right now is outside the control of IT. If I go to my IT guy, and I say, ‘Listen, my Office 365 experience is really sucky right now. What’s going on?’ What are they going to look at? What telemetry, what data, and where are they going to get it from? The internet? You’re going to go to your service provider and you’re going to whine to them and complain that you’re not meeting your SLAs because Office 365 performance in Maine is really sucky for my employees. You have no data to prove it; you have no data to hold them accountable.”