Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Today, we delve into a pivotal tool that holds immense value for both network admins and business owners alike: Network Assessment Reports (NARs). Not only will we explore the significance of network assessments in maintaining a well-functioning network, but we'll also guide you on creating dynamic visual network assessment reports. These reports serve as a comprehensive source of crucial information, offering insights into network issues, areas for improvement, and much more.

Judging by the tweet storm (or is that called an X storm now?), productivity in corporate North America took a big hit as the week ended. Microsoft Teams had an issue that was “impacting multiple Microsoft Teams features”. Users reported problems of: messages not posting, inability to access files, and interrupted workflows.

Observability isn't just a buzzword; it's a vital compass guiding us through the maze of system health and performance. As we’ve adopted microservice architectures, the ability to know ‘what is currently happening in our system’ has diminished as our operational resilience has increased. We find services scattered among a maze of interconnections and interdependencies. And even the logs that used to guide are now scattered throughout this maze.

Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) is an advanced analytics and operations management solution that is designed to help organizations address the challenges of monitoring and managing IT operations in the era of digital transformation. AIOps leverages the power of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Technologies to enable continuous insights across IT operations monitoring.

In the fast-paced landscape of technology, AI-driven Incident Management and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) have emerged as critical components in ensuring the seamless functioning of digital systems. AI algorithms are increasingly employed to detect, diagnose, and resolve incidents with unprecedented speed and efficiency, revolutionizing the traditional approaches to reliability.

PowerShell is a powerful scripting language that allows you to automate tasks on your Windows computer. System administrators and IT professionals can use PowerShell to boost IT efficiency and productivity by executing commands through the tool’s command-line interface. The features and benefits of PowerShell include integration with the.NET framework, remote management for large-scale IT environments, and the ability to create pipelines of multiple commands.

Platform Engineering is a hot topic these days. We’ve seen the hype around it in 2023, and I expect we shall see it becoming production-grade as we move into 2024. I wanted to look into this topic, and learn from those who’ve already implemented it at scale: the e-commerce hyperscaler Shopify. In the latest episode of OpenObservability Talks, I had the pleasure of hosting Aparna Subramanian, the Director of Production Engineering at Shopify.

Despite what you may have seen and heard, the intersection of logging, metrics and tracing does not tell the whole story about observability. Our systems emit telemetry, and those previously noted telemetry signals are considered the “three pillars” of observability. They’re all important, but by themselves, they aren’t observability. Many users I see day in and day out find themselves with broken observability even though they’re collecting those three pillars.