Thomas Stocking, co-founder and vice president of product strategy, recently wrote an article titled How to Efficiently Discover Network Resources, featured in The Data Center Journal. The article talks about network discovery tools and processes, and why it’s important to automate and standardize. Many business processes (security management, service delivery and service support) depend on the administrator’s knowledge of the network details.

An ominous flashing red light on a blacked-out computer screen means the promise of a threat. It was 21:26 on a Sunday night and an Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) alert shot across one of our screens. A security analyst usually has just minutes to respond, carry out an investigation on behalf of the organisation under threat and make a critical decision.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can have many different definitions, and can sometimes cause confusion. Does CRM include correspondence before a company becomes a customer, such as sales and marketing? Should CRM extend to all areas of a business, including internal IT teams who don’t interact with customers? Drawing the line of what is and isn’t part of the CRM experience can be difficult.

Like all good IT organizations, you religiously measure the performance and availability of your services and applications. But if those apps run in the cloud, critical components are often delivered by a third party or the cloud provider. In the case of a service disruption or degraded performance, how do you know what the problem is—your code, the network, or the provider? And, if the problem is with the service provider, how do you convince them to take action as quickly as possible?

Despite the London heatwave, we had a decent turnout for our July DevOps Exchange meetup which was once again hosted at the Sainsbury’s HQ in Holborn alongside our partners Linux Recruit. As Tony was away on holiday this month, Colin had the pleasure of hosting the enture event himself this month, and I hear he did a great job!

This week’s big news is that Grafana v5.2.2 was released and includes fixes for Prometheus graphs, dashboard links, loading external plugins, SQL connection leaks, and more. Also, check out our new Grafana Flux plugin and monitor temperature and forecasts using Grafana and the openweathermap API.

If you had to choose one thing to improve your business, it should without a doubt be customer experience. That may strike you as odd, as the usual intuition of most businesses is to improve their product or find a way to be price competitive. But recent research has shown that customer service is likely to overtake both of those elements by 2020.