The proliferation of applications, services and IT systems (public cloud, private cloud and on-prem) is leading to an explosion of log and event data in enterprises today. While this data has the potential to provide critical insight to IT, security, DevOps and business teams, the volume of data is overwhelming most organizations.

As the CEO of AppDynamics through 2019, I had the privilege of speaking with hundreds of enterprise IT leaders who consistently asked me for my thoughts on a reference architecture for their emerging observability stack. They were fully committed to adopting core observability principles, but were struggling with the number of domain specific monitoring tools, the exploding cost of data storage, the lack of data governance controls and the brittle pair-wise systems integration required to correlate across the data silos. I always had a hard time providing guidance, because, frankly, there were no great enterprise-grade solutions to these problems. That is, until now.