Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In a recent article, The Register suggested that SQL Server is “too lucrative to ditch, but too legacy to love” - but is that actually true? With many years’ SQL Server, PostgreSQL and Oracle experience between them, Steve Jones, Kellyn Gorman, Grant Fritchey, and Pat Wright offer their thoughts on the article, and the current state of SQL Server as a whole - including how it fares against other databases in 2026.

A self-service portal is designed to reduce IT support tickets by enabling employees to solve common issues on their own. But if self-service is supposed to improve efficiency, why do so many portals remain unused while help desk queues continue to grow? In this video, you'll learn what a self-service portal is, why many organizations struggle with low adoption, and the three key factors that determine whether your portal actually reduces ticket volume.

This video explains how to trace a user through older or inaccessible services using identifiable information like emails or usernames when OpenTelemetry traces are unavailable.

Learn how to trace complex multi-hop transactions across microservices when OpenTelemetry isn't available or trace parents get lost. This quick tutorial demonstrates how to use full-text search in proxymock (a free CLI and UI tool) to isolate user journeys (like looking up a specific username) and instantly generate waterfall tracing views. Whether you are working locally or in a Kubernetes cluster, you can record API traffic, visualize multi-hop requests, and easily transition those captures into load or regression tests.

An agent harness for AIOps is the runtime layer that coding agents like Claude Code were never built to provide: context isolation, decision traceability, and gated execution for tools that touch production. Aura is Mezmo's open-source (Apache 2.0) agent harness, purpose-built for operations work rather than software development.