When we look at the calls our help desk receives, we see many of the same issues repeatedly. Some of the most common calls help desk agents receive involve issues like password resets, new hardware requests, and generating standard reports. And when we examine our IT environments as a whole over the last decade or so, there has been a huge emphasis on automation. Why? We have learned that automation reduces risk, streamlines workflows, and makes everyone more productive.

Over half of the world’s population are active on social media, with a typical user spending two hours and 25 minutes each day, equating to roughly one full waking day of their life each week. According to a report published by researchers at the University of California, San Diego—on average, we consume about 34 gigabytes of data and information each day.

Digital services are increasingly built as a collection of components working in concert to deliver significant business functions. Understanding how these components of a system are working is crucial to reliably delivering a service. With many systems interacting, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to understand the state of your services and their dependencies without detailed data about how they function.

An API, application programming interface, is a collection of tools, protocols, and subroutines that can be used when building software programs or applications. APIs makes software development easier by providing reusable components and a set of clearly defined communication protocols. Recently APIs have come to mean web services, but there are also APIs for software and hardware libraries, operating systems and databases.

I’ve been in the SQL Server space for a long time—my entire career, in fact—but it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m great at what I do; it merely means I’ve seen a lot. I’ve watched things go well and have experienced my fair share of spectacular failures, too. Earlier in my career, I stayed around too long in environments where things weren’t going great.

Over the past twenty years I have been working in tech, I have seen a variety of products and solutions come and go. For many, it is because they overly complicate something that should’ve been simple. With SolarWinds, I am thrilled to work with solutions designed from the start to be simple for our customers to use. We focus on providing solutions built to integrate with other elements of your network and complement them, so they become more effective.

It’s increasingly common for service desk teams to perform some support operations over a live chat. This is a win for everyone. When using chat support, employees are looking for quick wins when it comes to solving their problems, and in many cases, the service desk can help them quickly without needing a site visit. I worked the service desk way before online chats were possible, but the truth is not much has changed since then.

Internal IT support teams are often the first place employees turn for help with technical issues, and it’s important for team members to be able to quickly understand problems, identify solutions, and enable the employee to get back to work. Though there are plenty of technologies and organizational practices capable of improving support service teams, team-wide skills are the heart of every great service provider.

Testing is commonly understood to be an essential and fundamental part of software development, but when and how to test is open to a wider variety of opinions. DevOps practitioners often advocate for performance and quality testing early in the development and deployment process. This is known as a “shift left” approach.

The pandemic hit manufacturing hard, with the workforce, supply chains, and investment all taking heavy blows. The bounce-back has also been punishing on the sector, with severe global competition for materials, disrupted logistics, and workforce shortages, all exacerbated by the human and economic disaster of Ukraine.