Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If the users aren’t happy, then in short order, neither will anyone else be. The ubiquity of information technology has exposed users to the best the IT industry has to offer—and the worst. So, if end-user experience is king, how does one go about ensuring users stay happy? The short answer is application performance management (APM) tools. Users don’t care if the apps they use are in the cloud, on-premises, or something in between.

The work being done on federal, state, and local levels to ensure the health of society during and post-COVID-19 will be driven by the Internet of Things (IoT). From contact tracing to drones, the reopening of America will be regulated by millions of data streams delivered from thousands of connection points. IT practitioners will be tasked with making sense of all the information coming across their screens. Different devices produce different types of data streams and logs.

Anyone who’s worked in IT knows a great deal of the day-to-day work doesn’t come down to one secret trick—the job consists mainly of stringing together hard-won wisdom and convenient Google searches to solve problems. Working in IT is a little like parenting; when you’re first told you need to pick up your children’s LEGO bricks every day, you say, “Really? Is it really necessary to do it every single day?” But you only have to step on one at 1 a.m.

Gartner says when COVID-19 hit the United States in March, 88% of businesses mandated or strongly encouraged employees to work from home. Sales, marketing, human resources, and most other business operations were all conducted from somewhere outside of the office. This drastic move required IT to accommodate employees in an entirely new way than what they had become accustomed to.

Debugging and resolving incidents in nodeless environments can be difficult, time-consuming, and most of all, frustrating. Exporting your logs from these ephemeral and disparate services to a centrally aggregated log is a great way to correlate information, quickly resolve incidents, and make your life a little easier.

A fully grown security operations center (SOC) was, until recently, a luxury, affordable for the largest organizations only, but even in global players, budget constraints are real. Unfortunately, the willingness to raise money for security seems to require an incident first. However, we often forget there’s no need for a dedicated war room, and it doesn’t always require a full team. Centralized security can be outsourced.

A poorly performing website or web application hurts the end-user experience and can result in lost revenue and customers. That’s why businesses seek better tools and processes to simplify digital performance monitoring to expedite detection and troubleshooting of performance issues. There are numerous website performance and availability monitoring tools available for this purpose.

Last month, MongoDB released v4.4 of their database; the new release contains several changes and improvements, but the introduction of structured JSON logging caught our eye, which makes it easier to extract valuable insights from the logs using products like SolarWinds® Loggly®. In this post, we’ll review how to get started sending your MongoDB logs to Loggly and some of the insights you can easily get from your server logs when you upgrade to the latest version.

Digital transformation is changing the way companies do business, putting pressure on IT to continually monitor and manage the performance of applications delivering business-critical services. IT managers are responsible for making sure applications in today’s increasingly complex IT environment are running as fast and efficiently as possible. Poorly performing applications must be optimized for companies to leverage the benefits of digital transformation.

Okay, now we have you thinking about ham and that delicious holiday meal on the horizon. While not quite as delicious, hardware asset management, or HAM, is something IT should have on its plate this season. “What would it cost to replace all the desktops and laptops in your organization?” A hypothetical question posed on a recent webcast by Jon Hauser, IT director at the University of Washington School of Social Work.