Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Apache Kafka is a very popular open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications. Amazon MSK is a fully managed Kafka service that makes using Kafka even easier. But how do you get started with Kafka on AWS? How do you migrate your existing Kafka environment to the cloud? How do you manage many Kafka environments at once?

Who’s faking it? Data-driven decision-making (and ensuring related investment is delivering on its promises) has been elevated in importance. Every enterprise is replacing opinion with data-driven decision-making, correct? A brand new research report from EMA (Enterprise Management Associates) titled, “A Data-Driven Enterprise” looks behind the curtain to separate facts and reality from fiction and aspiration. Here are some of the findings from the latest research on enterprises.

As digital transformation is now one of the main priorities for organizations across all industries, it is critical to have a solid strategy in place to ensure successful and lasting adoption. However, most technology leaders and decision-makers completely ignore some of the potential mistakes that stymie their organization’s digital transformation.

Nastel technical specialist, Terry House, has written a blog post here looking at the IBM MQ appliance and comparing it to the traditional software form of IBM MQ. He explores the additional security and cost benefits and also the additional monitoring and management requirements that are addressed by the Nastel Navigator X i2M platform.

Functional unit and integration tests are a standard tool of any software development organization, helping not only to ensure correctness of newly implemented code, but also to identify regressions — bugs in existing functionality introduced by a code change. The situation looks different though when it comes to regressions related to non-functional requirements, in particular performance-related ones: How to detect increased response times in a web application?

As we push more data to the cloud, avoidable mistakes are hampering migration. The biggest culprit: messy data with inadequate security and integration.Data transfers seem to be the easiest part of cloud migration. After all, migrating applications is the biggest pain in the neck. Data replication and migration should be simple, something that’s done during the last step of the application and data migration process. Right?

Big data is transforming the relationship between companies and customers. Analyzing large amounts of data for marketing purposes is not new, but recent advancements in big data technology have given advertisers powerful new ways of understanding consumers’ behaviors, needs and preferences. Big data helps you optimize each customer’s demands and convert them into prospective purchasers.

Apache Kafka is a distributed messaging system that can be used to build applications with high throughput and resilience. It is often used in conjunction with other big data technologies, such as Hadoop and Spark. Kafka-based applications are typically used for real-time data processing, including streaming analytics, fraud detection, and customer sentiment analysis. There are many derivatives such as Confluent Kafka, Cloudera Kafka, and IBM Event Streams.

The concept of AIOps is simple: Infuse artificial intelligence(AI) into IT to make operations speedier and more efficient. In theory, AIOps at its best should lead to an autonomous IT environment in which functions can run themselves with little or no human intervention. In practicality, the path to this nirvana state is anything but straightforward and raises several questions. Where should you start? How do you measure the value? Is AI ready to scale across production environments?