When I was younger, everything was hosted in-house and third-party components were installed on our server. Everything is connected to everything else.

Without visibility, companies don't have complete control over their cloud applications, can't adapt to performance issues, and can't gather intelligence on how users interact with the application.

As companies move more of their business infrastructure online, the experience of the user has become the most important metric for performance. When an application runs on a company-owned device, the system has complete visibility into its performance and interactions with users. Cloud applications have components that aren't under an organization's control and might not offer an easy way to gather performance data and information on interactions.

Source: MIT Technology Review Insights

Chawla says that you can monitor a lot of things, but what is most relevant is to figure out what is happening. There are many technologies that can help people untangle the mess, but the question is do you have an end-to-end strategy to have visibility into everything going

In December of 2021, the average page required 74 requests to load into a desktop browser. The average company has more than 200 APIs, with organizations managing more ways of interacting with applications through them. Tracking performance has become more difficult due to third-party integrations and the expansion of the software supply chain.

Gaining and keeping visibility is difficult because they are outside of a company's control, which creates blind spots in the application stack. Application performance is important, but gaining insight into the application experience from the user's point of view has become even more important.

We look at our standards and make sure that we capture the learnings from the failures. We try to keep the lights on for now, and make sure we handle it differently later.

The full report can be downloaded.

Insights is the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. The editorial staff of MIT Technology Review did not write it.