Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2023

Selecting the Best Azure VM Type for Your Workload

Organizations all over the world have been moving workloads to the cloud. Microsoft Azure provides a host of benefits and services which make it a top choice for on-premises to cloud migrations. When it comes to migrating workloads, Azure virtual machines are a great choice with VM options up to 416 vCPUs and 12 TB of memory and storage IOPS up to 3.7 million.

Hyperscalers: The Complete Guide to What, Why and How

We’ve heard a lot about hyperscalers over the last several years as public cloud adoption began to rise. Now, they’ve become a central part of global IT infrastructure and essential to operations. There are many reasons to choose a hyperscaler as your cloud provider, so let’s take a closer look at what a hyperscaler is and how it can be leveraged for your organization.

How to Assess Current Workloads for a Cloud Migration

Organizations large and small are taking advantage of cloud computing. This can be as simple as leveraging Office 365 or migrating all of their business applications from a data center into the cloud. We’ve all been witness to the explosive growth of cloud applications over the past several years. When organizations start considering migrating business applications to the cloud, there are many considerations, everything from security, compliance, cost, disaster recovery, and more.

ChatOps Explained and Why DevOps Teams Should Care

ChatOps can speed up organizations’ responses to user needs while relieving support staff of a lot of tedious activities. Many helpdesk or IT tickets are entered for routine end-user questions, such as finding out what hours you’re open or changing a password. However, organizations have also moved toward automating development and required operations through a process popularly known as DevOps.

How to Build Processes and Reports While Protecting Data for GDPR

Privacy and data protection remain essential priorities for companies of all types and sizes. More organizations realize they are accountable for any personal information they store, even with a justifiable business reason. While regulations like GDPR technically cover the personal data of European residents, it is wise to treat all customer data with the same level of responsibility.

Why You Should Rely More on Your IT Self-Service Portal

No matter what roles we play, we’ve all been frustrated end users at some time or another. Sometimes it’s as simple as struggling to find the documentation we need, whereas other times, we’re sitting there doing nothing because we forgot our passwords and must wait for an administrator to reset them.

The Importance of Observability

While IT pros know they need to monitor IT services, they also know it can be the most difficult part of their job. Traditionally, enterprises have cobbled together several disparate monitoring products to address all their monitoring needs – but there are often gaps. Within these gaps, issues are missed, and the possibility of proactive issue resolution becomes nearly impossible.

What Databases Taught Me About Scaling Observability

I recently attended a virtual event and heard the speaker comment, “Relational databases don’t scale.” To my ears, this is about as silly a statement as saying, “No one can eat 26 hot dogs in 12 minutes” right before Kobayashi shows up and eats 50. In my experience, relational databases scale when they’re placed in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. Just imagine if Kobayashi was your data architect!

Maximising the potential of business intelligence with data warehouse automation

Data is a business's most valuable asset. When given the ability to harness its power, organisations can transform their data into meaningful business intelligence (BI)-and act on this to stay ahead in an ever-more competitive landscape. This is where the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) comes in. An EDW centralises and consolidates data from many sources-storing it in a denormalised structure called a star schema-making it easy to analyze, visualise, and forecast essential business metrics.

DataOps vs. DevOps - Similar or Completely Different?

Over the past several years, there has been a big focus on streamlining infrastructure operations. Many organizations have begun using DevOps principles in their software development and operations activities. We've also seen a new Ops in town recently: DataOps. Good things come from new methods to help teams collaborate across an organization.

How Cloud Asset Management Provides Fuller Inventory Visibility

Cloud adoption has grown in recent years. From organizations developing a cloud-native strategy to those focused on cloud migration, there are many different ways to consume the cloud. No matter the reason for choosing the cloud or how organizations get there, many overlook one critical piece of the puzzle: cloud asset management. Have you been frustrated by figuring out what you have deployed in what cloud? If so, you're not alone. Let's examine why this is so important.