Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If one story stands out in the tech industry for 2023, it was the coming-out party for generative AI. OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot, which was publicly released late in 2022, seized the industry’s imagination in 2023, becoming the fastest-growing consumer application ever. The technology quickly evolved throughout 2023 with a paid subscription service; an API; iOS and Android versions; an enterprise version; plug-ins; and an AI image generator.

Imagine this familiar scenario: You're at the helm of an agency responsible for managing a plethora of websites, each as unique as the clients they represent. It's a balancing act of monumental proportions – ensuring every site remains flawlessly operational, all while juggling the diverse demands of your client portfolio. The challenge? Each website demands constant vigilance.

In recent years, the pace of IT and network modernization fueled by digital transformation has only continued to accelerate. At the same time, cyber threats have continued to grow more frequent and sophisticated. Given these trends, the move to establish enhanced collaboration between network and security teams, an approach known as NetSecOps, has moved from a nice-to-have to a fundamental imperative.

The cost of services is on everybody’s mind right now, with interest rates rising, economic growth slowing, and organizational budgets increasingly feeling the pinch. But I hear a special edge in people’s voices when it comes to their observability bill, and I don’t think it’s just about the cost of goods sold.

In the rapidly evolving telecom sector, the concept of “cloudification” is not just a trend but a transformative shift, reshaping how services are delivered and managed. This change is underpinned by modern software architectures featuring modularity, microservices, and cloud-native designs. As we embrace this new era, marked by the rise of “netcos” and “servcos,” we must also navigate the complexities it brings.

The ability to extract meaningful insights from your wealth of organisational information is often the key differentiator between successful businesses and those struggling to stay competitive. Splunk, a renowned leader in the realm of data analytics and visualisation, has emerged as a powerful ally in this quest for actionable knowledge.

In the ever-evolving world of software development, one constant remains - the pursuit of better performance. As applications grow in complexity and demand, the need for tools to uncover performance bottlenecks becomes paramount. Flamegraphs, a brainchild of Brendan Gregg, has emerged as an important visualization of insight, showing those dark corners of your codebase that need optimization.

Anybody who monitors logs of any kinds, knows that the extracting useful information from the gigabytes of data being collected remains one of the biggest challenges. One of the more important metrics to keep an eye on are all sorts of logons that occur in your network – especially if they originate on the Internet – such as VPN logins.

Work environments, the network that supports them, and the network management tools to fix those work environments seem to have changed overnight. But the shift was one which was long in the making, several decades to be exact. With the acceleration of work from home due to the pandemic, SaaS services accelerated into a necessity. Along with this dramatic shift, network management shifted to accommodate SaaS and gone were seemingly static paradigms about work and networking.