Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we are exploring how prolonged dependence on AI could influence human beings' neural pathways, cognitive habits, and the behavioral changes that follows. As children, many of us would have watched the juggler at a circus in amazement. One ball became two, then three, and several more since it was a cumulative act.

Top Tips is a weekly column where we examine the trends transforming the workplace. This week, we're exploring the relationship between AI and creativity, why convenience shouldn't come at the cost of original thinking, and practical ways to keep your creative edge sharp. Have you ever heard of the prefrontal cortex? It's one of the most fascinating parts of the human brain.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and share ways to stay ahead. This week, let's look at a few ways you can become an essentialist at work. It's easy to fill up our calendar with tasks that may not be impactful, but we end up feeling falsely accomplished. This happens to us more often than we realize, and the antidote to this is to be an essentialist.

"Every website was once designed for people. That assumption is beginning to change." For nearly three decades, the internet has worked in a predictable way. Whenever we wanted to know something, we searched for it, clicked through a few websites, compared information, and made a decision. Whether it was buying a new phone, planning a vacation, or researching software for work, businesses knew exactly how people behaved online.

Polling has been the go-to approach for network monitoring for years, and it still plays an important role in keeping networks healthy. But as networks become more distributed, application-driven, and data-intensive, simply polling devices more often isn't always the most efficient way to gain deeper operational insights. That's where network telemetry comes in.

Network admins want all devices with the same role to behave the same way. But in real environments, that consistency rarely lasts. Imagine two core switches in the same data center. They serve the same function and run the same OS version. One handles traffic without issue, while the other drops packets during peak hours. Logs show nothing obvious. Routing looks correct. The team spends hours checking links, hardware, and traffic paths.

Enterprise IT networks power business operations across the world. As businesses scale to catch up with an increasingly-demanding user base, networks also grow more complex. IT teams managing these networks have to monitor more data than before, under more stringent SLA terms, with little room for failure. Trying to do this manually across thousands of devices can take a lot of time and effort, and are prone to errors.

Unplanned outages often trace back to a simple but overlooked cause: an untracked configuration change. In many organizations, network device configurations are updated manually without approvals, documentation, or rollback plans. This lack of structure can lead to performance issues, downtime, and compliance risks. In this blog, we'll see how a core switch misconfiguration exposed the risks of unmanaged changes.

You hire an astute, hard-working, fresh graduate to run things for you. You hand them the keys to everything in your company; that includes every system, every endpoint, every file, and every password, all of it. Your only instruction to them? "Go ahead and improve things!" Then, trusting in their competence, you leave them to it. Doesn't that sound like a recipe for disaster? Yet that's precisely what's happening in IT departments across the world.

For years, monitoring was the gold standard of infrastructure management. Dashboards. Thresholds. Alerts. If everything on the dashboard was green, you didn't need to worry. If something turned red, you responded. It was a model built on predictability, and for a long time, it worked. But modern infrastructure is no longer predictable.