Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This month, I want to address a question I was sent from one of our MSP partners. As a smaller MSP looking to grow, they were wondering what they should focus on first: Marketing and lead gen to fill their sales pipeline? Or strategies to improve their organizational and operational efficiencies? They recognized that both areas are currently a source of weakness for their business.

For new networkers, Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) can be an intimidating topic. Many old-timers speak of spanning-tree in ominous tones, recounting the time when a “spanning-tree loop” brought down the network. Some managers strictly forbid anyone from changing anything related to the spanning tree, fearing a resulting service interruption. Some of the fear surrounding spanning trees is likely based on bad experiences, but some are based on ignorance—at least partly.

Is that a bird’s nest or is it spaghetti? Have you ever asked that question when looking into a IT wiring closet? At some point in your tenure as a network manager, you’ve likely been asked to inventory a network and create a network topology diagram.

The TCP/IP protocol sometimes shows its age. It was invented in an era when networks were very slow and packet loss was high. So one of the main considerations in early protocol design was reliability. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) has built-in mechanisms for reliability that include validating a checksum on every packet, as well as detection and retransmission of dropped or out-of-order packets.

In May I mostly took the time to plan out the rest of the year, as well as one big feature to make OnlineOrNot's incident management more realistic.

Today, network operations teams encounter significant hurdles due to shortages of skilled personnel and fragmented toolsets. Despite consolidation efforts, it's common for teams to manage up to 15 different monitoring products. Research suggests that network professionals believe they could potentially resolve 53% of network issues by implementing improved network management tools.

Incident response is a structured approach to addressing and managing the aftermath of a security breach or cyberattack, also referred to as an IT incident, computer incident, or security incident. The goal is to handle the situation in a way that limits damage and reduces recovery time and costs. Additionally, it aims to improve strategies and solutions to prevent future security incidents.

I’ve been a user of Grafana OSS for seven years, starting with Grafana 5.0. My, how things have evolved since then. The first time I used Grafana was to monitor a Kafka data pipeline with a bunch of Java Spring Boot microservices and Prometheus to extract metrics. I was amazed how much you could do with Grafana and Prometheus together, and so I always kept Grafana on my short list of places I wanted to put my energy, either as a contributor or by working directly for the company.

In the world of DevOps, engineering organizations are constantly seeking solutions that can simplify operations, reduce overhead, and accelerate development. While a number of container orchestration platforms exist, their complexity and high maintenance demands often leave engineering leaders seeking alternatives. This is where Cycle comes in. Cycle’s LowOps container orchestration and infrastructure management platform is designed to get your team to 80% efficiency from day one.

Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) represent a significant advancement in enterprise orchestration, integrating various applications and infrastructures. SOAPs enable Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders to design and implement business services by combining workflow orchestration, workload automation, and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid digital infrastructure.