Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Information Technology (IT) has moved through many clearly defined eras. I don’t feel the need to list them all, but the latest one clearly is the move from discrete computers to virtualized software-configured environments, that we all colloquially call “the cloud”. And with each technological generation, we have improved the methods we use to integrate discrete modules of technology, and increased the level of automation.

It has been a while since I have been excited to write about encrypted tunnels. It might be the sheer pain of troubleshooting old technologies, or countless hours of falling down the rabbit hole of a project’s source code, that always motivated me to pursue a better alternative (without much luck). However, I believe luck is finally on my side.

One of the easiest ways to increase query performance in SQL Server is to make sure it can quickly access the requested data as efficiently as possible. In SQL Server, using one or more indexes can be exactly the fix you need. In fact, indexes are so important, SQL Server can warn you when it figures out there’s an index missing that would benefit a query.

We may be biased, but we think we’ve had some great blogs that are informational, impartial, and (hopefully) not boring to read about all things related to what’s happening on the internet. Looking back at our blog—dating back to 2006—one series saw the limelight from 2012-2017: the state of the internet series.

Collaboration tools like Slack and Teams are here to stay. They’re very much inseparable from the distributed workforce that we all continue to find ourselves in. A robust set of integrations are then an essential part of today's monitoring and observability platforms. Feeding Catchpoint data into your support team via a Slack channel could be the difference between catching a disruption early or having to respond to a full-blown outage.

There’s something that humans and machines have in common, and no, it’s not the disappointment suffered by the final season of Game of Thrones, or, well, at least not only that. What we have in common is that we need protection. You know, animals need it too, and plants, but if you’ve gotten this far, it seems that you’re interested in computers, networks and all these pretty modern “geek” things, so today we’ll talk about that kind of protection.

Managed service providers (MSPs) need an IT help desk to address and answer the technical questions of clients. In the modern MSP environment, the IT help desk is the primary source of contact between customers and knowledgeable, responsive support personnel. Successful help desks are customer oriented and encourage clients to report IT incidents when they occur.

This has been quite the summer to remember as we continue to witness our customers achieve remarkable efficiencies through automation such as deep integrations with change pipelines to suppress alerts during maintenance windows and correlating alerts to create incidents with dynamic and evolving descriptions that dramatically improve Incident management processes.

Systems run into problems all the time. To keep things running smoothly, we need to have an error monitoring and logging system to help us discover and resolve whatever issue that may arise as soon as possible. The bigger the system the more challenging it becomes to monitor it and pinpoint the issue. And with serverless systems with 100s of services running concurrently, monitoring and troubleshooting are even more challenging tasks.

The meanings behind job titles can be an elusive thing in that they might only make sense to the people actually in the roles. Take networking jobs. It’s pretty common for people to think some titles can be used interchangeably, and that depending on where you work, a job may have a different name. In some cases, even IT professionals believe that the network specialist vs engineer are jobs are really the same responsibilities.