Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In the first experiment, I wanted a baseline: if an AI coding agent gets the same production signal a human would get, can it fix bugs in a codebase it has never seen? Yes, but only when I gave it better context. With only an alert, the agent passed 51% of the runtime tests. When I added captured traffic, the actual request and response for the failing call, it climbed to 77%. This post is the second pass.

Microsoft SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) remains a widely used enterprise monitoring platform due to its deep integration with Windows, hybrid-cloud support, and extensible management packs. However, the value of SCOM is fully realized only when its alerts seamlessly flow into ITSM or ticketing systems. This ensures incidents are created, routed, and resolved efficiently.

June was about finishing touches. The fun part. Node.js support, which we previewed in May, is live. Anomaly detection graduated with a rebuilt algorithm, per-monitor controls, and access from the API, CLI, and MCP server. We also kept pulling on the same thread from recent months: Scout data should be reachable from wherever you actually work. The MCP server now covers historical insights, anomaly events, and 30-day metrics. Discord is a notification channel. The CLI has scout anomalies.

An IT asset audit is one of those processes most IT teams know they should run regularly and rarely do well. Records drift from reality, licenses go unchecked, and the first sign something is wrong usually arrives as an auditor's request or an unexpected vendor notice. This guide walks through how to perform an IT asset audit step by step, and how to structure the process so it never requires a last-minute scramble.

Observability platforms collect pre-instrumented logs, metrics, and distributed traces to monitor production systems and surface failures to human engineers. The adoption of AI into engineering has led observability providers to offer those same signals to agents. This is often packaged as AI observability, but the signals themselves were designed around a human investigation loop. AI coding agents work faster, consume data differently, and need feedback as they work rather than after deployment.

Since 2020, the modern workspace has fundamentally changed, where employees now operate across a mix of office, hybrid and remote locations. Critical systems are now distributed between data centres and public cloud platforms, and most corporate data lives in the cloud. This shift has expanded the attack surface for many businesses.

Over 90% of mid-sized and large companies estimate that a single hour of downtime now costs more than $300,000. The clock starts the moment something breaks, whether anyone has noticed it or not. And most outages don't start with alarms. They begin with a small issue inside the network: an overloaded switch, a saturated link, or an unstable interface. Left unnoticed, those small issues grow into user complaints, stalled work, lost revenue, and damaged customer trust.

For private medical practices in 2026, secure and efficient communication is non-negotiable. Standard consumer messaging apps like iMessage and WhatsApp are not compliant with privacy regulations and create significant risks for both patients and providers. Adopting a dedicated, HIPAA-secure messaging solution is essential for protecting patient data and streamlining clinical workflows.