Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Containerization packages a software component and its environment, dependencies, and configuration into an isolated unit called a container. That makes it possible to deploy an application consistently across different computing environments, whether on-premises or on the cloud. The concept of containerization is more than a decade old.

If you want to become a successful small business consultant, you need to leverage a range of tools and applications. Small business consultants are in high demand, and if you want to hit the ground running in this field, you need to have the right tools and applications at your disposal. In this article, we will explore three essential tools every small business consultant should use. These tools will help you manage your clients more effectively and streamline your operations.

There are different positions on whether observability and monitoring are two sides of the same coin. We will analyze and explain what the observability of a system is, what it has to do with monitoring and why it is important to understand the differences between the two.

In today’s world of flexible work, technology has to be one thing above all else: versatile. A decade ago, virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) wouldn’t have been able to meet this moment – VDI used to be too narrow and restricted in terms of what use cases it could service. Fortunately, VDI has evolved dramatically since those days. Now, with the right resources, there’s very little you can’t accomplish through virtual desktops.

The idea of paying money to store logs nobody is looking at may seem like a waste. Well, that is until you need those logs. At that point, you see how valuable log retention is, especially if there’s a security or compliance issue. When you prioritize log retention, you can look back to investigate an incident or provide data for an audit — especially when you centralize log and metric data in one platform.

Apple once ran, and caught a reasonable amount of flak for, an ad that implied Macs didn’t get viruses. The PC (John Hodgman) in the ad says there were “114,000 known viruses” for PCs in 2006, to which the Mac (Justin Long) replies, “PCs. Not Macs.” While misleading, it’s technically correct, which may have been sufficient to avoid truth-in-advertising lawsuits.

ARM processors become more popular and more cost-effective according to many benchmarks. One of them was made by Percona for MySQL. Some of our users reported issues with VictoriaMetrics at AWS Graviton instances. The main concerns were higher CPU and disk IO usage compared to x86 instances of the same size and for the same workload. By that time, we verified that VictoriaMetrics works fine for raspberry and IoT devices, but didn’t do any optimizations for ARM builds.

A configuration management database or CMDB can be a game changer in terms of service delivery. Done well, a CMDB benefits incident resolution, speeds up request fulfillment and makes change assessment safer. Implementing a CMDB is a significant task and it’s something that many IT departments struggle with. It’s very easy to make things complicated or difficult to maintain.

IBM Cloud Pak for Integration (CP4I) is a platform that helps you quickly and easily integrate your hybrid cloud applications with the systems and applications that are important for running your business. It can help to collaborate between the different application teams and businesses that exist in your organization and ensure that they are working together at maximum efficiency.