Azure lovers, we have good news for you. Our new years resolution in 2019 is to support the local Azure community. We kicked off with our first Azure Meetup in December. And as the numbers below suggest... people had a great time.

Join Matthew Long, Richard Benwell, and a host of other Christmas contributors, as we close the year with 12 Tips and Tricks, a review of 2018, and what we can expect looking forward to 2019. Make sure you check out the links section below, as we've added loads of links to related resources this month. Happy Holidays!

Global Service Monitor (GSM) checks the availability of web-based applications from different geographies across the world. Why is that important? It gives an insight in to the end user’s experience, and how well the application works for them. It also allows the monitoring expert to isolate network from application issues. And the best news? SCOM takes that awesome data from GSM and beams it into the console.

SCOM surged forward as an application performance management (APM) tool this summer. It received a Customers’ Choice 2018 award from Gartner in the APM category. SCOM shared the honour with AppDynamics, Dynatrace, New Relic and Solarwinds. I see you thinking – how did this happen? Well, more than 50 reviewers gave SCOM an average rating of 4.2, which means it met Gartner’s criteria to win the award.

It’s 2021 and 94% of all enterprise IT workloads are running in the public or private cloud. This is the prediction made by Cisco. So, your organisation has a choice – public or private cloud? Or perhaps both? We’ll walk through the pros and cons of each option. But first, a few definitions.

Are you planning a hybrid cloud monitoring strategy? Our checklist walks through six essential steps to success.