Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The experienced IT professional is no stranger to the term “automation.” However, many don’t fully grasp the potential this word presents to IT processes, including the fast-growing realm of intelligent automation. But before you start looking to automation to help rein in costs, it’s important to develop an automation strategy that best fits the needs of your organization. This article explores the three key areas in which to start when building your automation framework.

Organizations of all sizes invest in IT monitoring and analysis tools. But just because a computer knows what’s wrong doesn’t mean it can communicate those details effectively to IT teams. There is both art and science behind communication, which is why IT teams heavily rely upon data visualization. As organizations scale, so too does the importance of data visualization. Similarly, automating data analysis becomes increasingly useful with scale.

With Memorial Day right around the corner, customers are preparing their carts for a weekend of online sales and shopping. Unfortunately, the increase in online traffic for holiday sales is ripe with potential for issues. Similar to the glitches and crashes we see during holiday weekends such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the potential of website issues may increase with online traffic during Memorial Day weekend sales. Luckily, there are ways IT pros can prepare for a surge.

First, thanks for indulging the clickbait title joke. Serialization is the unsung hero of harmonizing network and application relations and deserves the occasional, snarky callout. Moreover, identifying how the unique mix of network clients in your environment consume your carefully manicured infrastructure is critical for managing network cost. Because today, a rapidly expanding, diverse pile of new technologies all assume the network is a magic grid, no tuning required.

You’ve solved database performance monitoring and documentation. Unfortunately, now you get lost between them.

In today’s technology-driven world, network automation tools have evolved from convenience to necessity in practically every IT field. Traditionally, IT managers would issue manual command lines to manage networks, but given the size of today’s business networks, manual workflows dealing with repetitive network tasks have become time-consuming and counterproductive, often at risk of incurring errors from manual implementation.

There’s a big difference between the MySQL database powering your internet of things (IoT) lightbulb and the one powering your website. There’s a chasm between the SQL Server Express database in your lightly used application’s VM and the monster multi-region SQL cluster you have running on Microsoft Azure. This kind of database diversity is everywhere today. But what are the differences between these databases, and how can administrators justify database spend?

How a software product feels is easy to overlook, but how the product works matters just as much, if not more. Results from digital experience monitoring point to how apps feel as the key determinant of their success. “That’s how it is with people. Nobody cares how it works as long as it works.” This famous line from The Matrix Reloaded (2003) resonates with the way many developers approach maintaining apps. Someone has to keep watch.

According to Dr. Stephen Hawking and the conservation of quantum information theory, information can neither be created nor destroyed… unless you work in IT. OK, he didn’t really say the part about IT; I did. In the physical world, information is constantly generated, curated, and consumed—from emails to cat videos to this blog post. Not to mention error messages, system logs, and alert emails you never read.