Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

At any point in time, your IT teams are constantly working on performance monitoring, security patching, scaling, and related activities. Most teams overlook one critical pillar: a reliable and up-to-date server inventory. Why did we emphasize the phrase "reliable and up-to-date"? Because there are still teams using a spreadsheet that was last updated years ago when a server inventory report is requested. What follows when you do not maintain an updated server inventory repository is.

As we step into a new year, one truth stands firm in financial services: resilience isn’t optional – it’s expected. Markets fluctuate, regulations evolve, and technology accelerates. Amid this complexity, IT leaders carry the responsibility of ensuring that operations don’t just survive disruption, they thrive through it.

To mark the launch, we’re publishing Agentic AI Essentials, a four-part series to help organizations navigate the reality of agentic AI adoption. Across the series, we’ll look at the questions that matter most: what’s real versus hype, how to avoid adoption pitfalls, how to measure ROI, and how roles will evolve once agents are onboarded. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s in store.

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on private, domain-specific data can unlock significant value for your specific use case. When done correctly, you can create AI apps that understand your organization’s unique context. These apps can speak your brand’s voice and deliver remarkably accurate results that general models cannot match. However, finetuning is not always the right solution. Many teams rush into this complex technique without exploring simpler alternatives first.

dbt is one of the most popular solutions for data transformations and modeling. Many commercial data pipelines rely on dozens, or even hundreds, of individual dbt jobs. Data engineers, data platform engineers, and analytics engineers who own these pipelines need to maintain a testing framework to prevent mistakes in data processing that can compromise analysis.

InfluxDB is a widely used time-series database designed for storing and querying metrics, events, and telemetry data. It’s commonly used for infrastructure monitoring, application instrumentation, and IoT-style workloads where time-based data is central. In many environments, InfluxDB already exists as part of the monitoring or data collection pipeline, and the primary need is simply to visualize that data effectively.