Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When you manage complex IT infrastructure, it becomes critical to use tooling to understand what’s happening across all of your systems in terms of performance, reliability, and compliance. Monitoring key indicators manually is simply no longer possible at that scale. Puppet has long been known as a solution for managing large environments and collecting a vast amount of data about your infrastructure, but accessing and visualizing that data in a meaningful way can be a challenge.

AI has emerged as a defining force in modern technology, spearheading transformation across industries. Yet, despite its promise to revolutionize workflows and unlock unprecedented efficiency, most DevOps organizations face significant hurdles in adopting AI safely and effectively. Concerns about complexity, scalability, and governance hold many decision makers back.

Managing today's complex enterprise infrastructure presents significant challenges — from siloed data and steep learning curves to time-consuming troubleshooting. As the pace of business accelerates and infrastructure demands grow, these obstacles are increasingly difficult to overcome. That’s why we built Infra Assistant, a new AI capability in Puppet Enterprise Advanced, powered by Perforce Intelligence.

Many IT teams underestimate the true cost of managing infrastructure themselves. At first glance, DIY tools may seem like a cost-effective and flexible solution — but the workflows you build and manage with in-house tooling reveal a host of hidden expenses, inefficiencies, and risks as your IT scales. While it’s not a new problem, it’s one that’s revealing itself more and more clearly as time goes on.

When looking at the broad landscape of IT automation tools, you’ll find dozens (if not hundreds) of tools that seem like viable solutions to your automation needs. Almost all of those tools can be broken down into two categories: Open source automation tools and commercial automation tools. (Open source automation tools with a commercial offering are still considered open source, even if the commercial edition has a price tag.)

The broad umbrella of today's IT security includes standards, tools, technologies, and human practices that reduce risk and protect your systems. System hardening is one conceptual catch-all for those components of IT security — but what does system hardening mean in relation to your actual day-to-day operations? And how do you achieve system hardening without burdening your whole team?

The software supply chain has become the backbone of modern IT environments. It powers applications, underpins operational processes, and drives innovation within organizations across industries. Securing the software supply chain has moved from a peripheral concern to a central element of cybersecurity: The vast network of code, dependencies, integrations, and third-party tools that comprise the supply chain is increasingly under siege from cyber threats and at risk of exploitation.

Let's face it: no one likes patching. For some IT ops teams, it's such a burden that it's easy to forget why patching is important. Lots of teams put off patching until it's deemed absolutely necessary, like a vital app update or a piece of critical software going EOL. We all know ignoring patches, or letting them pile up, is a bad practice. Read this blog to remind yourself why patching is crucial, what can happen if you don't patch, and how to stop putting it off.

Effective vulnerability management has become a growing priority for organizations. Aided in part by AI, threats and vulnerabilities grow in speed and sophistication while IT environments become more complex. The skill gap for cybersecurity keeps widening (further worsened by a sprawling toolkit), exposing critical systems to exploitation. Managing secure infrastructure manually just isn’t possible at the scale and speed today’s enterprises demand.