Enterprise IT infrastructure is becoming more complex as companies are developing and monitoring public, private, and hybrid cloud environments along with microservices and third-party integrations - all this results in fragmented data and customer experiences.

We conducted a survey to dig deeper into the problem and noticed a trend. Under the deluge of data,IT leaders are spending too much time reacting to alerts and not enough time building solutionsthat can optimize performance proactively.

That's why we believe it is time to clarify all we know about today's IT challenges and how we can help solve them for our customers into a four-part playbook for success. These four plays have been tested and proven with our customers as the most critical when priming your environment for data explosion and taking advantage of advanced application performance monitoring (APM).

Get ready to build a truly automated, proactive approach to managing business and IT performance. Download a free copy here. If you're not sure, read on for an introduction of the four plays.

The AIOps Play

Our survey found as many as 42% of IT leaders use monitoring and analytics tools to resolve technical issues reactively and in silos. It is no wonder their mean time to resolution (MTTR) has reached a higher than average one business day, which by our calculationscosts an average$402,542- that's for a single outage.

Consumers have higher than ever expectations for flawless application performance, so the reactive nature cannot sustain. Most survey respondents (74%) said they want to start using monitoring tools proactively to lower MTTR and protect their bottom line. This is where AIOps comes in.

AIOps is an emerging movement that combines artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to support IT operations - deriving real-time insights and actions to enable self-healing before revenue-impacting problems arise. It's no substitute for good development, of course, but self-healing is a capability Google considers critically important to the enterprise.

Only 15% of our survey respondents identified AIOps as a two-year priority, so there's no better time to adopt it for a competitive edge. Get guidance on how to deploy it in the playbook.

The Cloud Play

Cloud adoption has become a strategic imperative for enterprises grappling with vast amounts of data. According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index, 92% of customers have both public and private cloud environments and 88% do business with one or more clouds.

Does this mean you should be doing it, too?

The main reason for why companies are expanding to the cloud is to benefit from the best tools and platforms to drive innovation with improved time-to-market for their applications while ensuring scalability and availability.

Our customers have also found that expanding to the cloud creates more opportunities to demonstrate the value of APM by revealing how applications perform end-to-end before and after that shift. Inversely, this transaction-level visibility helps de-risk the expansion itself and translates into quite a few business benefits.

Learn about them in the playbook and see what APM-supported expansion to the cloud is best, based on your company's cloud readiness.

The Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) Play

Delivering great customer experiences isn't as simple as it once was. Customers expect apps to work. That means you're tasked with keeping tabs on every aspect of their experience and reacting quickly. Customer experience (CX) can be hard to track end-to-end as it becomes more complex.

A need for cross-functional visibility into complex digital experiences is in part what's driven digital transformation, which like cloud adoption is imperative to the innovation that makes those experiences delightful. Only 27% of technologists feel ready for digital transformation, but most recognize it as an urgent challenge to overcome.

One way is through digital experience monitoring (DEM).

DEM monitors the "operational excellence and behavior of a digital agent, human or machine, as it interacts with enterprise applications and services," as defined in Gartner's 2019 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring. In other words, DEM reframes the "customer" experience to include every human- or machine-generated interaction across your digital footprint, correlating these with application performance and business KPIs to capture the overall business value of your apps.

Gartner predicts enterprises will quadruple their APM functionality through 2021 to accommodate DEM. Read more about the strategy in the playbook.

The DevOps Play

Another key element of digital transformation is DevOps, a movement designed to support agile software development.

When dev teams are siloed off from IT ops, you can expect ongoing performance problems and delays in the production cycle. What you really want is ongoing application innovation and availability. In today's digital business, the only way to continually meet customer needs with new features is to transform your software development lifecycle to a DevOps approach that promotes collaboration business-wide for faster, higher-quality releases.

The rise of DevOps has already had a huge impact on the evolution of IT. As the demand for more and faster innovation increases, it's helping organizations deploy more code more efficiently.

In our survey, 91% of respondents said their monitoring tools only reveal how each release drives the performance of their own area of responsibility, drastically reducing visibility into and preparation for potential system-wide issues. See how a DevOps toolkit can provide you better visibility by viewing the playbook.

Download the AppDynamics playbook
to learn how you can benefit from one or more of these plays and get real-world advice from AppDynamics and Cisco customers.