When you visit the About section of a company’s website, you probably expect to find information about the company’s culture and values. In how many cases are those statements more hype than reality? Does the company do the things it needs to do to help its employees be their best? It’s never been more critical to foster employee engagement and productivity.

On a fairly regular basis, users will post to Reddit or Spiceworks or another IT forum to ask about the best support staff ratio of techs to users, and what other companies are finding sustainable. The question usually comes from an overworked tech who’s drowning in tickets and trying to understand what’s considered. The answers can get interesting. On Spiceworks, many people responded with details about the environments they support—and the range was notable.

Being a system administrator is a high-level and demanding profession. Yes, we’re talking long hours (not counting overtime!), unforeseen events requiring attention, and so much troubleshooting. But not everything about SysAdmin life has to be more challenging than it needs to be. That’s why we put together this list of must-have SysAdmin tools so you can optimize your workflow and focus on critical tasks.

Standard operating procedures—more commonly known as SOPs—are written, step-by-step instructions that describe how to perform a routine activity. While you can create an SOP for anything, an MSP SOP that outlines technical procedures is a well-known path to increasing efficiency in your business. Whether you’ve got existing MSP SOPs you’re interested in updating, or you’re looking for some basic steps to build brand-new SOPs around, you’ve come to the right place.

I speak to a lot of MSPs every day, and I’m always asked for advice on meeting new prospects. Finding new clients is one of the biggest challenges they all face. “Have you tried asking your existing clients for referrals?” is my stock answer. And for good reason—prospects referred to you by an existing client are four times more likely to buy than any other opportunities. Here are a few of my tips on how to generate client referrals from existing clients.

Distributed tracing is a method of tracking requests as they propagate through a distributed system. A trace is built from spans. Each span represents an interaction, like an HTTP request, a DB query, a serverless function invocation, etc. A trace is essentially a tree of spans. Based on the collected span data, a distributed tracing platform can capture all the interactions between the different architectural components and tie them together with a trace ID.

Does it seem like everyone’s talking about Zero Trust? Maybe you know everything there is to know about Zero Trust, especially Zero Trust for container security. But if your Zero Trust initiatives are being met with brick walls or blank stares, maybe you need some help from Gartner®. And they’ve got just the thing to help you explain the value of Zero Trust to your leadership; It’s called Quick Answer: How to Explain Zero Trust to Technology Executives.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is what you get when you treat operations as if it’s a software problem. The mission of an SRE practice is to protect, provide for and progress the software and systems offered and managed by an organization with an ever-watchful eye on their availability, latency, performance and capacity.1.

Everbridge partner Atos, a global leader in cloud and the digital workplace, recently published an interesting take on the future of work and how new technology trends will impact businesses and employees alike, now and in years to come. The company suggests that the combination of 5G and technologically augmented humans will drive some of the most significant changes in the way we work.

With the Grafana 8.5 release, we introduced the concept of service accounts. Now with the Grafana 9.1 release, we’re making service accounts generally available. This is a project that came out of technical necessity, but it has given us the opportunity to reflect on API tokens and machine-to-machine interaction across Grafana Labs.