As digital services span applications, infrastructure, cloud platforms, and AI workloads, organizations need new ways to understand how these systems behave.
Modern digital services rely on increasingly complex systems. What appears to users as a single application—booking a flight, executing a financial transaction, or accessing a healthcare service—often spans dozens of services, infrastructure layers, networks, storage systems, and cloud platforms operating across hybrid environments. As organizations scale distributed applications and adopt new technologies like AI, understanding how these systems behave—and where performance issues originate—has become significantly more challenging.
In this conversation from theCUBE’s NYSE Wired series at the New York Stock Exchange, Virtana CEO Paul Appleby discusses how the growing complexity of enterprise systems is reshaping the observability landscape and why organizations must begin thinking about applications as complete systems rather than isolated pieces of software.
Watch: Virtana CEO Paul Appleby explains how the increasing complexity of modern enterprise systems is driving the need for a new approach to observability.
“Virtana doesn’t just look at discrete components. We look at the entire system.”
— Paul Appleby, CEO, Virtana
Why Observability Must Evolve
Modern applications are no longer confined to a single platform or technology stack. A single user transaction may travel through services, containers, infrastructure, storage systems, and network paths before completing. As environments become more distributed—and as AI workloads introduce new infrastructure demands—understanding system behavior becomes significantly more difficult.
Traditional monitoring tools were built to observe individual components. But when performance issues arise, teams often discover that the root cause lives somewhere else in the system entirely. Reducing resolution time requires visibility that connects signals across the full stack and reveals where constraints truly originate.
The shift underway in observability reflects this reality: organizations must move beyond monitoring isolated components and toward understanding the full system that delivers a digital service.
3 Key Takeaways
- Modern applications are systems
What users experience as a single application is actually the result of many interconnected components operating across hybrid environments. - Enterprise environments are becoming more complex
Distributed architectures, shared infrastructure, and AI-driven workloads are increasing operational complexity and creating new dependencies across the stack. - Observability must evolve
To resolve incidents faster and operate these environments effectively, teams need observability that connects application behavior to the underlying infrastructure and services that support it.
How Virtana Can Help
This shift is exactly why Virtana recently introduced Application Observability, a new capability designed to connect application behavior with the infrastructure and platforms that actually deliver each request.
By correlating request performance with dependencies across services, Kubernetes, infrastructure, storage, and networks, Virtana helps teams move quickly from symptoms to root cause and resolve incidents faster across complex hybrid environments.
