Sometimes you talk with an expert about their strategic view. Sometimes you talk with an expert about their tactics and tools. And once in a while, you get to talk about both when you sit down with someone who's been doing their job well for a long time.

For this episode of InformationWeek's Expert Voice we went to the Splunk .conf2016 in Orlando, FL to talk with people who build all or part of their job strategy around intense monitoring of the computing infrastructure. We bring two of those interviews to you in this podcast -- and the two are from very different viewpoints.

The first interview is with Steven Hatch, who manages the Splunk deployment at Cox Automotive, a large publisher in the automotive industry. He's using Splunk to monitor the infrastructure in 40 different data centers and serve the needs of internal customers across all the business units that employ systems in those data centers. In addition, he's working with a team to collapse those 40 data centers down to about 4 -- with no loss of capability or function in the site reduction.

Next, we interviewed Atif Ghauri, CTO of The Herjavic Group, a large security service provider with customers around the world. Atif needs to monitor his own infrastructure for performance and security, and he needs to provide security monitoring to his customers, so he's using the monitoring tool for both internal and external customers. It's a different take on why those monitored functions are so critical -- but it's no less important than the functions that Hatch keeps within his sights.

Each of these executives brings years of experience to their use of monitoring and their choice of tools -- what do you think of the ideas they bring to the Expert Voice? We'd love for this to be a conversation -- let us know how you're using monitoring tools (and which monitoring tools you're using) in the comment section!

Music for this episode is "Skinny Leonard" by David Hyde. Expert Voice's theme is "Parasite" by Lamprey.