It’s official: Legacy IT infrastructure management (ITIM) tools have finally met their end. Several factors are combining to make existing on-premises ITIM tools nonviable in the presence of new cloud-based offerings. First and foremost, a slow but steady transition to generalists from specialists has left IT organizations with fewer experts required to manage a complex management tool.

The adoption of microservices and container technologies has increased rapidly as DevOps teams look into faster release cycles for application delivery. However, these ephemeral technologies dramatically increase the complexity of managing, visualizing and mapping dependencies between components in your IT infrastructure. Microservices are dynamic and can scale horizontally in an instant, which poses challenges in monitoring when the locations of containers and services are constantly changing.