Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Enterprises are facing new challenges not just in terms of staying relevant in the market and customers but also in controlling internal organizational chaos. Over the years, there have been a number of frameworks and models that were consistently being rolled out to assist enterprises to declutter operational and organizational challenges, streamline enterprise services and service delivery, and identify loopholes and fix them.

Did you know that Grafana pairs well with a fine wine? That’s what machine learning company ML6 discovered when they worked with their client Accolade Wines, an award-winning Australian vintner whose goal was to decrease the waste produced in its global operations. “Accolade Wines is really focused on being as efficient as possible,” says Rebecca Brooke, ML6’s team leader in the U.K. “They’re always looking at minimizing their environmental impact.”

In the digital era, most enterprises use a web platform to reach potential customers and showcase the products or solutions they offer. Websites have become extremely popular as a medium of establishing a brand image, and they contribute in making a major share of revenue. Well-planned websites can capture the attention of the target audience, increasing the probability of them turning into valuable, paying customers.

Unplanned downtime can drive significant losses in the form of unrealized revenue. Teams may be caught off guard, or may face an outage outside their control, extending downtime hours unnecessarily. Without automated monitoring and alerting, teams face undetected outages that silently threaten SLA fulfillment. The recommendations in this report are best used as a guide on what trends may drive Site Reliability Engineering in the near term.

As many of us are rediscovering an interest in board games, it feels relevant to make reference to Hasbro’s classic Clue. Understanding what’s going right or wrong in your sprawling digital business can feel a lot like a murder mystery: it was the authentication service in the east region with the memory exhaustion error. This analogy has a weakness when applied to modern operations. The Clue board game had 6 weapons, 6 suspects, and 9 rooms. That’s 324 combinations.

A difficult question we come across with many customers is ‘what does normal look like for my network?’. There are many reasons why monitoring for changes in network behaviour is important, with some great examples in this article - such as flagging potential security risks or predicting potential outages.

Managing a network more effectively has been something our customers have been asking us about for many years, but it has become an increasingly important topic as working from home becomes the new normal across the globe. In this blog series, I thought I’d present a few analytical techniques that we have seen our customers deploy on their network data to: Better understand their network and Develop baselines for network behaviour and detect anomalies.

Right now, millions of people are working remotely for the first time, and they’re doing so on company laptops and mobile devices. And with millions of these devices now offsite, this throws but one more wrinkle in tech support’s security plans—in addition to worrying about insecure networks and malware attacks, IT must also safeguard against physical theft. Yes, device encryption is the logical fail-safe for such a scenario and a must-have for any remote IT setup.

No matter what’s driving your move to an AWS or Azure cloud, two things are true. One, you don’t want to under-provision, which could create performance and availability issues. And two, you don’t want to overpay, because no one ever wants to do that. One of the key decisions you must make is which Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure virtual machine instance configuration you need. It’s a scoping exercise, but several factors make this easier said than done.

As enterprise IT systems have become more complex and distributed due to cloud infrastructure, containers, serverless technology, an ever-growing footprint of applications and devices, IoT, SDN, open source development tools and more, the practice of performance monitoring has become far more nuanced. In these modern IT environments, traditional monitoring practices centered on known issues aren’t enough.