Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Monitoring your Java applications is an essential part of ensuring high availability and good performance. And yet, many Java developers hold off on practicing application performance management (APM) until they’ve already deployed their application to a test environment, or even to production. Perhaps they don’t have access to an APM solution with the right insights, or maybe they don’t have the time or resources to deploy to a temporary environment and wait for metrics to come in.

Some, maybe. But not most. Look, I have this theory. I also have data. And as with most stories in my life, it all starts with a trip to Las Vegas. In 2017, I attended my first AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. For a while I heard how re:Invent was either a “cloud” or a “developer” event. I now believe neither to be true. Most people I met at re:Invent were operations folks. They were there to learn about monitoring and managing applications running in AWS.

IT service management (ITSM) has evolved into a much broader discipline than just delivering IT services to the business. It’s grown beyond the IT department and become an integral part of how every employee in almost every business unit performs and completes tasks. In a recent webcast, SolarWinds Sr. Solutions Engineer Liz Beavers, ITSM experts Valence Howden and Julie Mohr, and HDI’s Group Principal Analyst Roy Atkinson paint a picture of what can be expected for the future of ITSM.

IT professionals talk about automation… sometimes ad nauseum. We generally understand its value, even if we’re tribally divided by the specifics of its application. For civilians, automation is a catch-all for using technology to wield skills and abilities outside their experience (like placing an order through a complex infrastructure) and access the world of vendors and goods they wouldn’t have time to connect with on their own.

As hybrid environments become more popular, federal IT teams are faced with managing and securing their on-premises and cloud infrastructures, while minimizing costs—and there’s no single tool or approach that can solve all these problems. With this in mind, let’s look at three ways federal agencies can address these challenges by adopting new mindsets, tools, and best practices.

For more than a decade, the face of wireless has been IEEE 802.11 WLANs, your typical Wi-Fi networks prevalent in every home and business. In 2020 and beyond, the line is trending toward RF-based technologies departing from our common WLAN technologies. Tomorrow’s wireless networks will impact every organization and professional, as we work to incorporate, manage, and secure these deviant technologies.

Like application monitoring, database performance monitoring is a critical discipline. If there isn’t a code issue, there’s a good chance you have a database issue. Key metrics such as CPU and memory usage can give you important insights into your database’s performance. In addition, by monitoring slow queries, and inordinate number of database requests, you can combine this knowledge to optimize both.

Configuration items (CIs) in the configuration management database (CMDB) stores information regarding the relationships among its assets. IT configuration management is becoming increasingly critical in order to maintain service levels and keep all hardware and software performing at peak levels. In order to maintain those levels, there are a few things to understand about the CMDB, how those CIs are connected, and how their relationships can be used to improve technology services.

Everyone on the internet should follow good data security and privacy practices. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone. IT pros aren’t the only people who need to protect their data. If you’re online in any capacity, there are some basic techniques you should use. I’m not talking about things like encryption and data masking; if I tried to tell my mother about those, she would stare blankly at me.