Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Since Microsoft first introduced the Always On Availability Groups (AGs) feature in SQL Server 2012, there’s been a lot of interest in using AGs for both high availability and disaster recovery (HADR), as well as for offloading read-only workloads.

Ideally, observability should help you understand the state of your application and how it performs under different circumstances. However, while serverless observability may seem similar to serverless monitoring and testing, the three achieve different goals. Testing helps you check your application for known issues, and monitoring helps you evaluate system health according to known metrics. Observability helps you search and discover unknown issues, providing end-to-end visibility.

The South Dakota Bureau of Information and Telecommunications (BIT) provides quality customer services and partnerships to ensure South Dakota’s IT organization is responsive, reliable, and well-aligned to support the state government’s business needs. The BIT believes that “People should be online, not waiting in line.” The bureau’s goals for the state's 885,000 residents include.

In the beginning, there was the Log – or to be a bit more precise, there were application logs. At least that's how it was in the early days of application development, when raw log data itself was more often than not the point where troubleshooting began. Now, of course, the starting point for troubleshooting with cloud-based applications is much more likely to be an automatically-generated alert, or an indication on a monitoring dashboard that something isn't quite right.

Microsoft Azure is the fastest growing cloud platform at the moment. Many organizations use Microsoft Azure to quickly build and deliver cloud services that can scale or to migrate existing workloads to the cloud. However, larger and faster cloud services can quickly increase the complexity of a network. To solve this and ensure business-critical workloads run correctly, IT teams need deep visibility into their Azure environments.

Headquartered in the Netherlands, BCD Travel manages global business travel. It operates in 109 countries with annual revenues totaling $25 billion and employs nearly 11,000 people worldwide. To meet the current and future needs of a growing virtual workforce, the Network Operations Center (NOC) group at BCD Travel had to adapt and scale its IT infrastructure operations. Additional capabilities were needed to monitor Microsoft 365, Azure, Active Directory, AWS, Teams, and other critical SaaS services.

Given the numerous cyber-threats that organizations face these days, security has become one of the most serious issues on everyone’s mind. When it comes to protecting business-critical environments from malware, various security measures can make a significant difference. Patching is one such important component of ensuring the security of your infrastructure and data.