The text discusses the journey of a cloud service provider, DigitalOcean, in developing an effective approach to network monitoring. It highlights the challenges faced due to the complexity and scale of cloud networking infrastructure. The solution involved breaking down the problem into smaller, more manageable parts and focusing on measuring network availability first. By implementing status functions for various elements affecting network availability, they were able to create a simple indicator that plotted the level of availability experienced by each customer droplet. This approach not only helped their support team during outages but also provided valuable insights across the organization.