Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The public cloud has greatly increased the flexibility of businesses everywhere. Need another petabyte of storage? You’re but a few mouse clicks or a couple lines of code away from allocating all those disks with effectively no lead time. At the same time, it makes it easy for business units, a functional organization, or a disgruntled vice president with a corporate card—who may be frustrated with your IT for various reasons.

Poor application performance, besides being a sign of potential problems, is a strong predictor of unhappy users—and unhappy users are likely to become former customers. So software organizations are always searching for ways to improve the performance of their applications. One of the most effective of such ways to improve performance is obtaining visibility of your app’s behavior—which is something that can be achieved through monitoring.

Businesses both small and large require agility in how they handle device firmware and network configurations. For large networks especially, manual monitoring and change implementation can be inefficient. As such, more and more IT departments turn to automated network configuration management tools with bulk change capabilities.

Microservice architectures are everywhere these days. Even internal enterprise applications—which have typically been structured as self-contained monoliths—are now being designed using a microservices architecture. There are definite advantages to a microservices architecture. Breaking an application into discrete, independent chunks—basically mini apps—gives you enormous flexibility. But this flexibility dramatically increases complexity, especially when things go wrong.

One of the most common questions database professionals are asked by their systems and virtual machine (VM) administrators is “Why does the database server need so much memory?” You’ll get a more detailed answer to that question later in this post, but it’s important to understand a database engine is almost like a server within a server.

IT is ultimately about providing services to end users, and the IT help desk plays a critical role in this effort. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a major uptick in the number of inquiries fielded through the IT help desk in 2020—and this trend will extend into 2021 and beyond.

Making your customers happy is essential in any industry, but it’s imperative for online businesses because the competition is only a few clicks away. If you want your customers to be satisfied, providing them a great user experience is essential. This is easier said than done, however. There are many approaches for organizations wanting to improve their user experience, and picking the right one can become overwhelming. We’re here to help.

Understanding modern software applications isn’t just a question of what; it’s also a question of why. Why do we choose to use a particular technology? How does that technology serve the overall business needs? And when you have a problem, how do you figure out what’s wrong? If you’re in the position of trying to understand a modern software application for the first time, these questions can seem unanswerable.

The old saying goes like this: “If you don’t measure it, you can’t fix or improve it.” This reflects the obvious notion you can’t measure what you don’t monitor. But this isn’t where the story ends—it’s vitally important to choose, carefully and deliberately, what one measures and monitors. It’s also important to understand metrics in the overall context of an organization’s environment and goals.