Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In the last month, we’ve seen one of the most dramatic movements in economic activity ever recorded. Many business owners are clutched in the grips of mandatory closures and uncertainty of the future, for their business and for their employees. The tech world has been hit less hard — at least for now. Remote work is second nature to many of us and offering our products in the digital space means we are open for business.

I'm not sure what your work from home set up looks like, but mine includes an ironing board behind me. There's a set of golf clubs in the corner, and a pile of old clothes on the floor. My late grandmother's bookshelf tries desperately to bring some order to the room, but even it is filled with a hodgepodge of stuff. The problem is, I never intended to work from home. My "home office" can be best described as a storage room mixed with a little bit of the chaos.

Coronavirus has been a shock to the system for many IT organizations that are traditionally accustomed to working together in person. When you’re in an office, you can often use informal methods of communication—like swinging by someone’s desk, calling them on their office extension, or even imparting critical information when you run into them in the company cafeteria.

It has certainly been quite a month. With millions of workers forced to stay home due to COVID-19, or in some cases laid off altogether, the world’s networks have been under some unusual strains. Let’s see how that’s played out during this month in glitches.

At first glance — and probably second and third as well — having too much traffic seems like a really nice problem to have; like when billionaires struggle to decide which yacht to buy (“I say Thurston, the one with the tennis courts is quite lovely, but the one with the outdoor cinema is so charming”). However, too much traffic really is a problem, because it causes websites to either dramatically s-l-o-w down (which is terrible) or crash (which is worse than terrible).

The idea of applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to more rapidly and accurately resolve IT incidents and manage alerts has been gaining steam in the past year. While AIOps, as it’s frequently called, has spawned an entirely new market of startups, many enterprise IT leaders are playing a cautious hand so far – and for good reason. There are risks, though. If an AIOps tool goes wrong out of the gates, IT and executive trust diminishes.

DEJ's The Roadmap to Becoming a Top Performing Organization in Managing IT Operations report found that 40% of IT teams use more than 10 monitoring tools to ensure the right levels of operational visibility and control. Given the diversity of tools used by enterprises, the only way to ensure collaborative unified incident management is to use a modern AIOps platform with native infrastructure discovery and monitoring instrumentation.

If you sit back and look at what you’ve actually achieved over the last couple of weeks, you should feel very proud of yourself and your team. With virtually no warning, you’ve supported your clients well through the greatest business upheaval in modern times. You’ve probably set up countless VPNs. And no doubt you’ve been hunting around for new laptops, just like everyone else. While the COVID-19 situation is changing daily, the dust is starting to settle a little.

The Vanilla framework has a history of being released very infrequently. Sometimes it has been months between releases, which made the upgrade process often hard and time-consuming. One of the reasons for that was a manual and a quite time-consuming release process. Over several weeks earlier this year, we’ve been working on various improvements that helped us release more frequently and reliably.