Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Want to know how to make sure your website, web application, or API makes you stand out against the competition? It isn’t all about offering innovation (not that innovation doesn’t help), but taking what you do offer and making it the best. I.e., website and API uptime, performance, and function matter. We’ve got some tips to help you get there.

Black Friday. Everyone's throwing out coupon codes with crazy discounts, right? Why on earth would we be doubling our price for just that day? For many online services, Black Friday is a huge source of income. Webshops reportedly double or even triple their revenue that day. Many make up for a bad month in just that single day. On your most important sales day of the year, you want your site to be online. Therefore, on that day, our service is twice as valuable.

Whether it’s a scheduled maintenance or an unexpected outage, downtime is time your solutions are out of action and unavailable for use. Long or frequent periods of downtime have significant costs to the company, and ultimately undermine customer trust. So what is MTTR? And how can improving MTTR reduce downtime? Below are four key metrics to get you started.

Exoprise recently added support for OAuth (OAuth 2.0 to be exact) credentials to the core Exchange Online testing sensor. This capability has been requested in the past and with this new release, enables end-to-end testing of Exchange Online and the OAuth capabilities of Azure AD with Office 365 from multiple concurrent locations.

DevOps is a culture where full development team works together to complete software development and delivery to production. It is a practice that enables organizations to optimize speed and efficiency across IT functions.

When network hardware vendors issue device recalls, field notices, or security alerts, the implication can be massive for MSPs. Take the 2017 clock signal issue, for example. That huge recall of Intel microchips was a large-scale vulnerability for tons of devices—and meant MSPs had to figure out which devices were affected on which client sites.

In the world of agile there’s a demand to solve grey areas throughout the design process at lightning speed. Prototypes help the scrum team test ideas and refine them. Without prototypes, we can’t test ideas until the feature or product has been built which can be a recipe for disaster. It’s like running a marathon without training.

There’s a disconnect between business leaders and IT. As noted by a 2017 Forrester study conducted on behalf of Nexthink, just 36% of business users “think IT is aligned with the needs of the business,” even though technology services are now embedded into every aspect of enterprise culture, from mobile device use to wifi access to cloud computing.

Most organizations use their SIEM solution to automate repetitive security tasks, saving analysts time. But the reality is your system could be doing—and saving—so much more by blocking the obvious threat actors attempting to connect with your network, systems, and assets.

The whole internet is abuzz over GitHub Actions, if by ‘whole internet’ you mean ‘the part of the internet that is obsessed with serverless ops’ and by ‘abuzz’ you mean ‘aware of‘. But Actions are a bit surprising! GitHub is a company that has famously focused on doing a single thing extremely well. As the ranks of developer-tooling SaaS companies swells by the day, you would think GitHub would have long ago joined the fray.