Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AI has been on a decades-long journey to revolutionize technology by emulating human intelligence in computers. Recently, AI has extended its influence to areas of practical use with Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models. Today, LLMs enable a natural, simplified, and enhanced way for people to interact with data, the lifeblood of our modern world. In this extensive post, learn the history of LLMs, how they operate, and how they facilitate interaction with information.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has an extraordinary ability to process natural language, reason about a user’s prompts, and generate human-like conversation in response. However, as the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words” — and perhaps an even more significant achievement is ChatGPT’s ability to understand and answer questions about images.

This week at Enterprise Connect, Microsoft announced many compelling new Teams features to drive productivity, collaboration and to simplify the lives of its users. One of the most noteworthy announcements is that Microsoft is now delivering a 99.999% Microsoft Teams SLA uptime guarantee for Teams telephony. This covers uptime for calls that take place over the PSTN, including Microsoft Teams Phone, Teams Calling Plans and Audio Conferencing.

Kubernetes has changed the way many organizations approach the deployment of their applications. But despite its benefits, the additional layers of abstraction and reams of data can cause complexity around Kubernetes monitoring. We’ve seen so much of these challenges borne out in the results of the 2024 Observability Pulse survey. In the survey report, 36% of respondents say Kubernetes poses a challenge, and just 10% of organizations say they have full observability into their environments.

As companies adopt SD-WAN technologies, they increasingly rely on network services outside their control. The new reality is that network operations need end-to-end visibility on the network performance whether or not they own the infrastructure. In a 2023 EMA survey, 63% of companies report using the Internet as their primary WAN connectivity.

Recently, I improved all my homepage Core Web Vitals by focusing on improving just one metric: the Time to First Byte (TTFB). All it took was two small changes to how data is fetched to reduce the p75 TTFB from 3.46s to just 704ms. In this post I’ll explain how I found the issues, what I did to fix them, and the important decisions I made along the way. (And don’t worry, I’ll break down “p75” and “TTFB”, too!)

A domain name is a unique address used to access a website, like google.com or wikipedia.org. It's a string of text that maps to an IP address, which is the numerical label assigned to each device connected to the internet. Domain names are used to identify one or more IP addresses, making it easier for people to remember and access websites without memorizing complex numbers.