IT monitoring and management have traditionally been focused on an enterprise’s IT backbone; e.g. its data centers, servers, networks, etc. However, with more and more employees working from home these days, and customers or partners scattered around the world, organizations have all found it is critical to monitor and manage an extended network connection to ensure a supreme digital experience for their employees, customers, or partners.
Ever watch news coverage of an incoming hurricane? You’ve got those correspondents out there in the elements, wearing their yellow rain ponchos, fighting the wind, and describing the scene to an audience watching at home. That situation reminds me of life as an engineer managing a large-scale IT infrastructure. Although I’m no longer a sysadmin there were certainly days where I had to put on my metaphorical poncho and weather an incoming storm.
On Friday afternoon, 17 July 2020, many internet users experienced connectivity issues around the same time. Even sites like Discord, Feedly, Politico, Shopify and League of Legends were inaccessible. Initially, it was suspected that there was some kind of Denial-of-Service (DOS) attack, but we’ve since learnt that the outage was caused by issues with CloudFlare’s DNS service.
I’ll go out on a limb and venture a guess that everybody reading this blog has had challenges adjusting to life in a post COVID world. I certainly have. My latest challenge? Navigating the simultaneous use of a face mask in public venues while wearing glasses to read stuff that’s more than 20 feet away. Just like ski and water goggles, my prescription specs also fog up when simply taking a leisurely stroll through the grocery store.
Information Technology (IT), like many other industries, is tapping into the latest advancements in Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to solve a decades-old problem in the IT management world. History can teach us many things, and by diving into years of accumulated IT data, we can find meaningful insights and use them to guide the future.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) – once the basis of Science fiction is now reality. Though it is often accused of being a mere buzzword, it is very difficult to overstate its impact on the human experience, and as AI’s integration becomes more global it is necessary to understand its potential. It is important to zero in on what AI has to offer Information Technology and how integrating an AIOps driven IT department is beneficial to an enterprise.
Telemetry is the collection of measurements or other data at remote or inaccessible points and their automatic transmission to receiving equipment for monitoring. In network telemetry, network devices such as routers, firewalls and switches push real-time data continuously to one or more centralized locations for storage, processing and analysis.
Google recently joined Facebook, Apple, Amazon, LinkedIn, Twitter and HPE in recommending its North American employees work from home to help slow down the spread of Coronavirus COVID-19. Workers can communicate in real-time on message systems like Slack and videoconferencing like Zoom. However, with >200k tech workers now at home needing robust and secure connection to the internet for these high bandwidth collaboration tools, the virus is not the only thing these workers are slowing down.
Some of the most common challenges we hear about from customers are things that might be all too familiar to some of you. Things in IT have always changed rapidly, and it’s only picking up speed. The explosion of DevOps, cloud-centric architectures, and software-defined networking are making it increasingly difficult to keep monitoring and management tools in sync with the environment. This leads to another issue – management and individual teams lack visibility into the whole environment.
