History is filled with examples of corporate mergers gone wrong. There’s AOL – Time Warner in 2000 and HP – Compaq in 2001, and who can forget when Microsoft didn’t know what to do with all their extra cash and decided to buy Nokia, hoping it would help everyone forget about Windows Phone? As someone involved in more than a few acquisitions, I’ve learned how to tell if a merger will be successful.

In the Technical Validation report, “SolarWinds Observability: Observability and Service Management for Modern Application Architectures,” TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group examined SolarWinds® Observability for its ability to support organizations no matter where they are in their digital transformation journeys. In this Technical Summary, we highlight some of the high-level findings. For the full analysis, you can download the report for free.

Productivity measures the amount of work you can get done with defined time and resources—or, more formally, "a ratio between the output volume and the volume of inputs”. The key takeaway is this: anything we can do to increase the amount of work completed will increase productivity. Equally, anything which reduces the cost or time required to do that work will also increase productivity—which is what we all want.

After the craziness of the last few years, who can blame IT, DevOps, and operations teams for wanting more stability in their personal lives and jobs? Yet the message from the top isn’t in line with this: Gartner reports over 94% of CEOs aim to accelerate pandemic-era digital transformation and are investing 5.1% more into IT budgets. This means threading a delicate balance between stability and scalability.

To say modern enterprises are built on the cloud is an understatement. According to Gartner, enterprise spending on cloud applications surged to 57.7% in 2022, and investments into public cloud services hit a respectable 41%. These numbers are only predicted to grow further in 2025 as enterprises accelerate cloud rollouts and move into a cloud microservices architecture to realize greater agility, productivity, and competitiveness.

Cisco recently announced its plan to End of Life (EOL) Cisco Prime Infrastructure. While they’re offering an alternative solution with this announcement, Cisco DNA Center, support for multi-vendor environments appears to be decreasing.

The explosive growth of interconnected data across distributed systems has disrupted traditional development, DevOps, and ITOps practices and forced many organizations to rethink their cloud strategies. Higher-velocity feature development and more responsive support requests involve developers throughout the delivery cycle and require them to monitor and observe application behavior before releasing it to production.

Throughout the pandemic, we heard quite a bit about digital transformation initiatives. Companies are often looking for ways to leverage technology as a competitive advantage to accelerate business outcomes. However, if we’re looking for a true digital transformation, we need to take one step back and look at how the increasing use of technology affects our employees and the future of work.

Security is a never-ending journey that evolves as you add new products and applications. There’s no such thing as being 100% secure because things constantly move and adjust within your network, emphasizing the need for organizations to stay ahead of possible threats capable of directly and indirectly affecting them.

What is the cost of database performance for businesses today? The very shocking reality is most owners have absolutely no idea. In fact, I would even go so far as to say most business owners can’t even begin to understand everything this question might encompass.