Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re a systems administrator, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Ansible. But if you’re not familiar with the tool or just getting started with it, there are some key terms and concepts you need to know. Here we will give you an overview of Ansible, from its origins to the latest features. We’ll also cover some of the key terminology associated with Ansible so you can start using it effectively immediately.

Software applications have become crucial for business growth and success in today's world. However, as businesses become increasingly competitive, the necessity to provide top-notch software applications is also increasing. Additionally, as organisations gravitate towards developing extensive, feature-rich applications, they are witnessing an increase in software complexity – that can often cause things to get out of hand very quickly.

At incident.io, we empower teams to run incidents quickly and effectively from start to finish. One of the ways we help is by taking the manual admin out of your incidents. More often than not, folks are spending too much time thinking about the process, when the time would be better spent focusing on fixing. Our automated workflows, nudges and prompts help to embed best practices and unlock time for more impactful work.

When evaluating a monitoring product, it is essential you fully understand its alerting capabilities. Alerting is a responsive action triggered by a change in conditions within the system being monitored. Typically, an alert can be defined by a condition to trigger the alert and an action defining what that alert should do when the trigger condition occurs.

The impact of ransomware attacks on healthcare is as alarming as it is under-addressed. These attacks on the United States healthcare system alone are causing an annual burden of nearly $21 billion, including well over $100 million in ransoms. While the financial costs help illustrate the scale of the problem, the true cost is the tragic reality of impacted patient care – including higher patient mortality rates.

Creating, managing, and tracking high level goals can be incredibly burdensome and complex for organizations with numerous stakeholders and cross-functional collaboration. Team leads and executives manage multitudes of reporting tools and departments while contributors often have little visibility into the process of creating goals or the progress towards achieving those goals.

Today, It's a sad day for thousands of developers that were able to host their applications for free on Heroku. Heroku (acquired by Salesforce) announced that they discontinue their free tier to focus on "mission critical" businesses. Heroku has undoubtedly changed how developers deploy their applications in the cloud - but now, what are the valid alternatives? Here is a list of the top 3 best Heroku alternatives.

A full Observability stack has the goal of providing full centralized visibility to Development, Operations and Security teams into all of the Metrics, Logs and Traces generated by the applications and services under their domain. Many companies address these observability needs by buying a complete application performance management (APM) solution from a single vendor, like DataDog.

Most IT systems don’t operate in a vacuum—they have dependencies on other systems. And as organizations attempt to grow while trying to maximize their bottom lines, they soon discover it leads to a broad expansion of applications across the organization. It becomes especially evident as you look within an organization for any legacy systems hanging around for more than a handful of years. These systems are always considered “critical”—never to be upgraded or migrated.

Recent events have changed the world forever. For network operations (NetOps) teams, it means there’s no going back to the way things used to be. Virtually overnight, teams had to adapt to work-from-anywhere (WFA) models. The move to SaaS, cloud, and SD-WAN continue to accelerate—and in the process fundamentally alter the nature of network environments.