As technology evolves in the enterprise, oftentimes the processes and tools used to manage it must also evolve. The increased adoption of Kubernetes has become a major inflection point for those of us in the monitoring and management side of the IT operations world. What has worked for decades (traditional infrastructure monitoring) has to be adjusted to the complexity and ephemeral nature of modern distributed systems where Kubernetes has a prime role.

Modern IT environments and networks are more complicated and distributed than ever before, spanning public clouds, private clouds, edge locations and on-premise data centers. What once worked well—manual or simple monitoring tools—can no longer ensure end-to-end visibility within complex networks. How can you monitor what you can’t see? Fortunately, you now have access to a new generation of monitoring tools designed for the hybrid network.

DevOps teams and site reliability engineers (SREs) contend with a never-ending flood of notifications and alerts about outages, potential threats, and other incidents. Companies rely on their DevOps teams to not only keep abreast of all the notifications but also to identify and prioritize the critical alerts and resolve problems in a timely manner. Yet in 2021, International Data Corporation (IDC) reported that companies with 500-1,499 employees ignored or failed to investigate 27% of all alerts.

You get what you pay for is a common axiom, one that even applies to infrastructure management solutions. Cloud vendors bundle Digital Experience Management (DEM) solutions with their services, seemingly at no extra charge. But such products lack the capabilities needed to understand how enterprise computing resources function. As a result, corporations do not make needed adjustments and lose time, revenue and increase user frustration.

Are you a network admin who gets overwhelmed by the number of devices they have to manage? We can only imagine the plight you have to go through. Technological advancements have extended the scope of network monitoring. Way beyond the conventional norms of preventing downtime, network monitoring in today’s context is about maintaining the optimum performance of devices while delivering an enhanced end-user experience.

Wikipedia defines smoke testing as “preliminary testing to reveal simple failures severe enough to, for example, reject a prospective software release.” Also known as confidence testing, smoke testing is intended to focus on some critical aspects of the software that are required as a baseline.