Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ask any community member who’s ever donned the moderator tag in a new forum and they’ll agree that handling a multitude of new general questions, technical queries, and troubleshooting scenarios can be challenging at first. However, thanks to the rise of AI-powered chatbots, there are a lot of new opportunities to find innovative ways to tackle these challenges. The Mattermost Peer-to-Peer Forum is a good example of a community consisting primarily of developers.

Welcome to the era of AI. It’s the technology advancement that motivates and excites me every day as a CTO. Generative AI is already transforming many areas of our lives, from helping us write emails to assisting us with customer service. What waits for us on the immediate horizon? Today, we released our annual predictions series. Splunk’s 2024 Predictions features three editions: Executive, Security and Observability.

As larger MSPs have been able to push their services upstream to bigger companies, and with the rise of things like co-managed IT services opening this option up to smaller MSPs as well, many are finding that this calls for them to adopt more mature IT service management (ITSM) practices. So how does ITSM differ from the professional services automation (PSA) platforms commonly used by MSPs?

In today's digitally-driven landscape, the role of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) has become pivotal in shaping the way we connect and conduct business. The quality of Internet services has evolved into a critical factor, directly influencing individuals' daily experiences and companies' operational efficiency.

The cornerstone of every successful relationship—business or otherwise—is a clear, mutual set of expectations. In IT, this plays out in the form of service level agreements (SLAs). But really, SLAs are only the first step in the journey to a happy customer relationship. The real key to maintaining happy customers over the long term is SLA management. Knowing how important SLAs are raises several questions: How do you create one, what should it contain, and how do you manage them?

This holiday season, AWS made waves by dropping a bombshell announcement: “AWS does not permit the sale of reserved instances (RIs) obtained through a discount program (per AWS Service Terms 5.5).” In other words, AWS is banning the resale of discounted RIs in their RI Marketplace. (See the full policy here, section 5.5.) The ban officially goes into effect on January 1, 2024.

For organizations that leverage AWS resources, CloudWatch is a “must-have.” Operations teams leverage data from their AWS environments to identify service issues and maintain availability. By using CloudWatch and its associated products, organizations can monitor their AWS resource usage to optimize their environments.

The clock is ticking for financial services companies that operate in the European Union (EU). Starting in January 2025, financial services providers and their third-party technology service providers must meet the new regulatory requirements of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA).

Great news for developers who leverage containers — JFrog has expanded its support for the OCI Container standard with dedicated OCI repositories! Before we touch on that, let’s do a quick recap on OCI containers for those unfamiliar with them outside the context of Docker.