Because of the hybrid way cloud and physical IT infrastructure works together – and the demands for even greater reliability and response time from Internet users – every company is starting to look more and more like an IT company. C-level executives need immediate, accurate information on their companies’ performance, so performance and application dashboards are getting rolled up to higher levels of the organization in ways that can be interpreted with a glance.

Network monitoring, therefore, is actually being pushed into the spotlight, and monitoring platforms have to keep up with the increasing pace of innovation.

It’s simple: Application performance is the make and break of the next big technology hit. Chances are the world would not be using Uber or Airbnb if the user experience varied by 100s or even 10s of milliseconds. Network monitoring can help identify instances in which performance may be degraded.

And what happens in the unfortunate event that a slowdown is detected? Sure, infrastructure in the cloud can be orchestrated to instantly move workloads and effectively self-heal, or to adjust sizing for load. But what if it happens regularly from a single cloud vendor? What if the slowdown is on the boundary of different technologies and you ultimately have different teams or vendors pointing fingers at one another?

You can only get to the root cause of service problems by correlating the performance and availability of what’s happening in the infrastructure. That means being able to look across the entire infrastructure – cloud and physical – in a unified, integrated way.

The cloud requires a monitoring platform that scales higher and faster, that handles all flavors of the hybrid data center, that’s open to integration with the rest of the IT ecosystems, and provides a unified view across the entire application and technology stack.

Now more than ever, monitoring matters.