For this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Alex Williams and returning co-host Donnie Berkholz are joined by Phillip Liu, Founder, CTO, and Engineer at SignalFx, to discuss monitoring the modern distributed application.

"It's very easy to create a virtual machine," says Phillip, "and the virtual machine is basically sized for your application, so no longer are you in a world where you have big metal servers and you have many applications running on the same physical server."

However, if and when problems arise, it's not as easy to pinpoint the causes as it was ten years ago, when IT teams would triage these issues in-house.

Alex wonders, "How is monitoring moving to the center of this new generation of microservices architecture that users are building?"

With the proliferation of microservices and the explosion of instances, Phillip says that "people just don't know where to start. There are actually a lot of great tools out there that tell you what happens when a particular instance goes down, but doesn't give insight as to how the overall service is doing."

These are the types of conversations that SignalFx promotes on its blog and carries into its customer relationships, which range from startups to Fortune 500 enterprise companies.