How agentic AI, real-time visibility, and stronger governance can help enterprises protect critical services and manage increasingly complex IT environments.
When a critical application fails, the last thing an IT team needs is a debate over who's responsible. Yet in complex enterprise environments, network, application, and compute teams often rely on separate legacy monitoring tools, each providing only part of the picture. Identifying the root cause can become a time-consuming exercise while essential services remain unavailable.
As organizations expand their use of AI, hybrid infrastructure, and sovereign cloud environments, the challenge is becoming more pressing. The systems supporting critical services are growing more interconnected, while the need for resilience, operational efficiency, and effective governance continues to increase. AI agents are starting to take on some of that operational load, but an agent reasoning from legacy monitoring data sees the same partial picture the humans do.
But are enterprise leaders seeing the same risks as the teams responsible for keeping these systems running?
Research by Virtana suggests a significant observability gap between what boardrooms believe they know about their IT environments and what frontline operators experience.
In this interview, The Register's Tim Phillips speaks with Paul Appleby, CEO of Virtana, about the limitations of legacy monitoring approaches and how agentic observability could help organizations gain a clearer picture of their infrastructure.
Appleby explores why fragmented legacy monitoring can leave IT teams struggling to distinguish the cause of an incident from its symptoms, and how agentic observability, which correlates real-time telemetry across applications, cloud, infrastructure, networks, and AI systems, gives AI agents the context to accelerate root cause analysis and remediation.
The discussion also examines the growing importance of observability for data sovereignty and AI infrastructure. As enterprises invest in AI factories and increasingly complex workloads, Appleby considers how organizations can maintain visibility across the technology stack, strengthen governance, and address operational risks before they disrupt critical services.
For IT leaders, the interview offers a perspective on moving beyond the traditional focus on proving which team wasn't responsible, toward faster resolution, preventative observability, and more resilient operations.
It also raises an important question for executive teams: Is investment in governance and operational controls keeping pace with the infrastructure and AI services their businesses increasingly depend on?
Watch the full interview below to explore how agentic observability can help enterprises can close the observability gap and strengthen their approach to IT resilience.
Contributed by Virtana