Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Over the last couple of years, there has been exponential growth in the volume and variety of machine data. The main reason has been the ever-growing number of connected machines in IT infrastructure, the sophistication of data algorithms, and the increased use of IoT devices. This data has proven to be quite valuable - even necessary - as an organisation can analyse and use it to drive productivity, improve efficiency, and gain visibility for their business. There is a catch: to make the machine data work for them, organisations need a simplified tool that can analyse and visualise. This is where Splunk comes in.

vCenter High Availability (vCenter HA) protects against vCenter Server application failures. Using automated failover from active to passive, vCenter HA supports high availability with minimal downtime.

Observability is a term that has gained a lot of traction in recent years, particularly in the realm of software engineering and DevOps. At its core, observability refers to the ability to gain insight into the internal workings of a system by observing its external outputs. This allows engineers to diagnose and troubleshoot issues with the system, as well as to monitor its performance and behaviour.

Microservices are a popular software design architecture that breaks apart monolithic systems. A microservice application is built as a collection of loosely coupled services. Each microservice is responsible for a single feature. They interact with each other via communication protocols such as HTTP.

Bandwidth monitoring provides IT administrators with the assurance that the network has sufficient capacity to run business-critical applications. In addition, network ops team have end-to-end visibility to identify network hogs that cause the congestion. Typically, when a single component overloads in any network, it can bring the entire operation to its knees and impact the employee digital experience. For example, even if you may have a dedicated service plan from your ISP, employees will end up complaining about issues like large file transfer time and slower applications.

They say change is good. But in IT operations, change is also the number one cause of outages. According to the Uptime Institute, 49% of all service outages are attributed to configuration and change management errors. That's a lot of avoidable headaches. And because errors often have downstream effects, it may not be obvious what caused an outage, resulting in prolonged downtime that affects revenue-generating business services, results in service level agreement (SLA) penalties, and causes a loss of customer trust. And those costs add up quickly. Gartner figures the meter for an average downtime event runs at $5,600 per minute.