Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When you’re investing in automation solutions, ultimately, tangible results need to follow quickly. Getting a return on investment (ROI) out of an automation project after two years is something that would have been OK in the not-so-distant past but is no longer acceptable nowadays. With the current speed of change, where new technologies come and go and existing ones evolve at lightning speed, IT teams require much faster time to value on automation investments.

Today’s blog comes from Kevin Howell, CEO of UK partner – Howell Technology Group (HTG) about their work supplying secure cloud technologies and remote working solutions to government and regulated customers. HTG are a trusted industry leader in the UK, who offer virtual desktops, managed services and efficient modern workplace solutions. Their solutions are also available with the UK Government’s Digital Market place under the G-Cloud Framework.

Stoking fears about the threat landscape is a popular approach, and one that I don’t particularly care for. Many will tell you that the threat landscape is constantly changing, that threats are getting more complex, and that actors are getting more sophisticated. “The whole world is getting more difficult and scarier, so buy our stuff!” There’s a ton of media sensationalism too, with the popular image of the hacker sitting at a computer, wearing a dark hoodie.

Here at Grafana Labs, we’re always striving to reduce the amount of effort needed to maintain plugins across different versions of Grafana. That is why we’re excited to provide you with a tool to check the compatibility of your plugin with the latest Grafana plugins API. We know that it can be frustrating for developers to find out people can’t use their plugins. Over the past few months, we’ve been working on detecting the breaking changes as soon as they happen.

Over the years we’ve received requests from our customers for a feature that can enable their customers and their end users to create/ report incidents directly on Squadcast. To our valued customers - we heard you! We are excited to introduce Webforms to do exactly that. In the past, we’ve addressed the challenges pertaining to On-call processes and best practices that teams can implement.

Service Level Agreements are designed to foster trust between your customers and your business. They help define the maximum amount of downtime your team finds acceptable. While they can have legal repercussions, SLAs are fundamentally about trust. Your customers use your service because you’re the best at what you do. They remain loyal because they trust you to do what they need. Retention in SaaS is very fickle, and competition in certain spaces is quite stiff.

When it comes to IoT data, MQTT is a superstar. With so many IoT devices generating data out in the world, developers need ways to access it. After all, data lies at the heart of every application. But data doesn’t just magically manifest itself into your datastore, and building the right data pipeline can make or break an application. Data collection is not a one-size-fits-all problem to solve.

Syslog is a very common method for transmitting data from network devices and open systems servers data to analytics platforms like Elastic and Splunk. As adaptable as syslog is, it still has significant constraints, which is a pain for most companies that lack the resources to scale their capability needed for syslog.

In the last half-decade, AIOps and observability have arguably been the hottest two topics in IT operations management. Gartner first mentioned AIOps—Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations—in 2016, defining it as using big data and machine learning to automate IT operations processes, such as event correlation, anomaly detection and causality determination.

This week over at WebPageTest, we’re excited to be taking our first steps into the performance education space with our new completely free online course, Lightning-Fast Web Performance by WPT Senior Experience Engineer, Scott Jehl. This course is for you, whether you’re a DevOps engineer curious to learn more about WebPerf or you’re part of a front-end and QA team responsible for website optimization and lowering latency.