Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Of all the KPIs that gauge the health and operational fitness of an enterprise, Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) from an outage or downtime is one of the most crucial. Yet while MTTR is a universally recognized metric, many organizations still fail to consider the total cost of MTTR when deciding where and how to invest in their IT environments.

Continuous compliance and risk management can help keep your organization safe as the threat landscape changes and expands each year. The IT operations team is no longer just responsible for a few machines; they are managing complex environments that span across technologies, across teams, and at scale. They're expected to work fast while simultaneously considering the often-conflicting requirements of cost, compliance, and even workforce skills gaps.

Did you know you can find classes by name and tag? classesmatching() dynamically sources information from the current state. For example, let’s say you have classes representing a system’s role. Furthermore, let’s say that we want a host to only have a single role class defined. Finally, if we have more than one role class defined, then we don’t want to proceed.

When’s the last time you did something without knowing how it could turn out? Surprises can add a little excitement to your day-to-day, but one place they’re not really welcome is in infrastructure code. That’s why we have change impact analysis, a method of predicting the effect one change can have on other parts of a system before you make it. Software change impact analysis, as you might imagine, assesses how changes to a piece of software can affect other parts of the same system.

CIS Benchmarks are important for security and compliance. In this blog, you'll get an overview, plus learn how to enforce CIS Benchmarks with Puppet.

Workflow management lets IT departments streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and reduce errors. By automating repetitive IT tasks, your IT team can focus on more strategic activities, ultimately driving innovation and improving service delivery. Here’s how to get started.

Whether you are migrating from Ansible to CFEngine to gain some of the benefits of scale or autonomy or just need some functionality in an Ansible module, the ansible promise type can be a great tool to utilize. It also provides a compelling alternative to ansible-pull and works around some of the caveats included with that strategy. CFEngine has battle-tested features needed for the pull architecture.

Are you familiar with CFEngines special variables? Probably you are familiar with sys variables like sys.fqhost (the fully qualified host name) and sys.policy_hub (the IP address of the machine the host is bootstrapped to) but I want to highlight a few other special variables you may not be so familiar with.