Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You’ve heard of observability, which has fast become one of the IT industry’s buzzwords du jour. But what about actionability, or the ability to translate observability into meaningful action? The latter term may not be a trending buzzword (not yet) – indeed, “actionability” perhaps sounds almost boring – but it’s just as essential as observability in managing complex, cloud-native environments.

The National Retail Federation forecasted historic holidays sales this 2021 season, as retailers grappled with high volumes of in-store and digital traffic, along with a need for full visibility into the user experience. They turned to monitoring their Point-of-Sale (POS) systems for key analytics that revealed unique, real-time details about what customers were experiencing.

If you’re like most organizations, you’re leveraging Jenkins for all sorts of things. Deployment pipelines, automated API tests, even glorified CRON jobs just to name a few.

Remember the days when you needed a pocket of change to pay for parking your car? How things have changed! Today, the focus is on smart parking solutions with ticketless entry, automatic license plate recognition, live monitoring of parking space availability, the use of QR codes, UHF windscreen tags, radio frequency identification, and payment cards.

Automation. It’s a common term. Some may call it a buzzword, even. When it comes to building a network, it’s usually not your first consideration. After all, what’s most important is getting users and devices online—and keeping them there. Isn’t automating the network an advanced step? Are we even capable of making network monitoring and management automatic?

Delivering value to customers quickly and efficiently is critical to the success of modern businesses. Understanding the process and timeframe during which an organization generates new ideas and then designs, develops and deploys them is vital to success. At the recent Illuminate User Conference, Drew Horn, Director of Business Development, held a discussion with Clara Ko, Director of Engineering at Sauce Labs, and Bryan Veselka, Director and Product Owner for Cloud and Automation at Vizient.

Happy New Year 2022! The fireworks are all fired, the champagne is over. It is time to get back to work. We are glad to see you here though. 2021 was a good year for OpenStack and its Ubuntu-based community. First, we all have seen Ubuntu becoming the number one operating system (OS) for OpenStack deployment. Then, the Open Infrastructure Foundation (OIF) reported explosive growth in the number of production OpenStack clouds. The community grew and settled on the most convenient platform.

The previous blog post talked about the composability of applications. The key element for composing applications is defining the relations between application elements. And supporting relations is one of the advantages of the Charmed Operator Framework – including its runtime, the Charmed Operator Lifecycle Manager.

In an increasingly data-driven world, the ability to summarize and display data while making it easy to understand and actionable is more important than ever. Dashboards appear in all types of software with various approaches behind their design. Despite how they differ in appearance and the information they display, at a conceptual level all dashboards have the same goal and purpose.

We took advantage of the quiet days between holidays to look back on the year past and thank our users and customers for their support in 2021 - and wish you a very happy 2022!