Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Both the technology and infrastructure we use have changed how we deliver services to our customers (or employees in this case). But how are our businesses adapting to these changes? How are we identifying relationships across new environments? Are we understanding the implications of what’s being introduced? In order to keep business applications and operations running smoothly, it’s crucial to understand the value of three key ITIL practices: configuration, change, and release management.

If you’ve run across other articles I’ve written about hybrid cloud, you’ll notice a familiar theme: it’s an artifact of other technology decisions nobody asked for. As such, it’s left up to IT operations to figure out how to know if it’s working well, cost-effectively, or as expected in the first place. However, tools are improving rapidly, and IT teams are gaining skill with the model and technologies.

The U.K. public sector holds some of the most important and sensitive data in the country, from private medical records to military intelligence. Consistently protecting this data is a major priority, which means the IT teams working within the public sector are entrusted with implementing the most effective security measures to prevent attacks or internal mishaps.

Change isn’t without its detractors in terms of people and systems. A misstep in expanding application performance monitoring (APM) across full-stack application monitoring can result in the degradation of availability and performance, stopping a digital transformation effort in its tracks. Avoid this at all costs. Deploying a full-scale digital transformation is a vast undertaking well beyond the scope of this brief article.

Knowledge management is a cornerstone of IT service management (ITSM). It provides technical guidance, steps to best troubleshoot issues, and in some cases an outlet to expand on tribal knowledge. Not only can knowledge content help drive self-service and employee empowerment, aiding in case deflection, but it can also serve as an extension of your organization’s culture.

As a consumer, you most likely can agree that the overall experience in the buying process is equally, if not more, important than the product or service itself. Forbes actually says 73% of consumers say a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties. A haircut, a fancy meal, or a new pair of shoes were nice, but what if the hairstylist, waiter, or sales associate was rude to you? What if they weren’t attentive and treated you as if you were dispensable to the business?

Thousands of teams use SolarWinds® Papertrail™ to manage different types of logs. And with such a large and diverse group of users, there’s a wide variety of needs and preferences. Fortunately, we added a Display Preferences menu to the footer in the new Papertrail event viewer, allowing us to create and deliver new display options and color themes. If you’ve opened the Display Preferences menu this week, you may have noticed two new color themes: Solarized and Solarized Light.

Mobile working is becoming the reality for an increasing number of public sector staff. But the threat and impact brought by the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak has seen many organizations instructing office-based employees to work remotely, as a way to minimize the risk of infection and spreading of the virus.

With the state of the world today, healthcare facilities of all kinds and sizes are operating under a state of distress. Employees are working on the frontlines, while also having to manage low budgets for IT security, coupled with low resources and all the while having to manage legal and compliance issues on top of it. Sometimes there’s so much emphasis put on the primary platform where patient health information (PHI) resides, other parts of the network are overlooked to determine compliance.

Quality service and providing value to service desk users is a sure way to boost employee engagement. In fact, if employees aren’t satisfied with their requests and providers aren’t finding ways to improve their experience, what purpose does the service desk have? Service level management (SLM) holds IT pros accountable for services they’re providing to customers. But a common problem that arises from this strategy is fulfilling the parameters set within service level agreements (SLAs).