Recently I got the chance to speak with Neil Keating, Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer at Bright Horse, a full-service IT experience consulting and training company. Neil’s candor and deep knowledge about IT Operations and digital experience was obvious from the start. Find a brief clip of our conversation here and several helpful nuggets for IT leaders in the text below!

Enterprises often have several servers, firewalls, databases, mobile devices, API endpoints, and other infrastructure that powers their IT. Because of this, organizations must provide resources to manage logged events across the environment. Logging is a factor in detecting and blocking cyber-attacks, and organizations use log data for auditing during an investigation after an incident. Brokers, such as Apache Kafka, will ingest logging data in real-time, process, store, and route data.

Good news for Salesforce users: With the new Salesforce plugin for Grafana, available now with an Enterprise license, you can instantly visualize your SFDC data in Grafana dashboards. Plus, Grafana allows you to visualize the Salesforce data alongside all sorts of other data. One interesting use case is correlating sales data to system metrics and logs, which would be valuable if your company uses any software systems at all to help generate revenue.

We are pleased to announce the beta launch of hosted Grafana in addition to our existing ELK as a Service & hosted Open Distro services. As organisations around the world are constantly looking for ways that they can ensure compliance is being upheld, speeding up Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) and reducing the risk of DDoS attacks, managed Grafana forms a vital role in improving metrics observability across the entirety of your infrastructure.

The word observability has its root in control theory. R.E. Kálmán in 1960 defined it as a measure of how well you can infer the internal states of a system from knowledge of its external outputs. Observability is such a powerful concept because it allows you to understand the internal state of a system without the complexity of the inner workings. In other words, you can figure out what’s going on just by looking at the output.