In this third article in a series discussing the five most common obstacles to achieving full-stack observability, let’s examine how digital transformation leads to visibility gaps–and what to do about it.
Where Are Cloud-Native Blind Spots?
As more businesses embark on cloud transformations, many are discovering that their observability practices haven’t kept up. Teams are stuck trying to monitor hybrid, evolving environments with siloed tools built for an earlier generation of IT. And that disconnect has consequences.
According to recent research, the average organization juggles 11 different monitoring tools, each tailored to a specific platform or domain. Yet despite these investments, 52% of surveyed organizations still lack full-stack observability. That visibility gap often translates directly into outages: nearly half (49%) of organizations report business-critical application disruptions every few months, and nearly a quarter (24%) face them even more frequently.
So, what is wrong?
The Challenge of Evolving Infrastructure
The truth is that many organizations aren’t failing to transform—they’re struggling to observe the transformation as it unfolds.
Modern architectures are messy by design. A single business process might span self-hosted legacy servers, cloud-native microservices in AWS, and databases in Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Monitoring this blend requires more than just bolting on another tool. It requires an observability strategy that’s flexible, unified, and cloud-aware.
This is where traditional models fall short. They were built for static, siloed environments where infrastructure rarely changed and monitoring followed strict boundaries. But hybrid IT is dynamic. Cloud services spin up and down in minutes, and application architectures morph across environments. In this context, observability cannot be static. It must evolve in step with the infrastructure.
"And, Not Or": Observability That Adapts
Here’s the good news: modern observability doesn’t need to choose between cloud and on-premises. It can—and should—do both.
The key is architectural flexibility. Whether an organization deploys observability as a self-hosted solution or through a cloud-native SaaS offering, the deployment model shouldn’t constrain what can be observed. A self-hosted solution can and should support observability for cloud-native services. Likewise, a SaaS-based solution should extend visibility into traditional, on-prem infrastructure.
This is the foundation of the “observability anywhere, precision everywhere” philosophy: letting organizations observe what they need, how they need, without compromise. Whether you’re a manufacturing firm slowly migrating to Azure, a digital-native startup scaling rapidly in Kubernetes, or a global enterprise bridging dozens of legacy and cloud environments, the observability platform should meet you where you are and grow with you.
Joining the Dots Across the Journey
No two cloud journeys are identical. Some organizations go cloud-first, others embrace hybrid IT for the long haul, and many dip their toes into cloud workloads while retaining core systems in data centers.
In this landscape, it’s natural for teams to use a mix of observability tools, combining platform-native insights (like Azure Monitor or CloudWatch) with more holistic platforms. But the north star remains the same: to understand the behavior of systems and services end-to-end, across every layer and location.
It’s not about forcing consolidation overnight. It’s about enabling connection, correlating logs, metrics, traces, and topology across environments so teams can see the full picture. This is how observability becomes more than monitoring: it becomes a strategic capability that aligns IT performance with business outcomes.
Because when you can trace issues across the full stack, from the router in your data center to the cloud function triggering your API, you’re not just keeping pace with transformation. You’re leading it.
Siloed data? Siloed teams. Explore why teams need a unified platform to shed light on their infrastructure.
