Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In this first edition of our Customer Spotlight series, we are joined by James Kahn and Ben Gittins of Idea 11. Idea 11 is an award-winning, full-stack AWS IT company that specializes in digital transformations, cloud infrastructure, software development and managed services.

Over a year after COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, the hope of speaking about it in the past tense is something we all still hold on to. Not only are we still being challenged by it in the present, but it has changed the way we think and do many things. However, just because something has become normalized over time (out of necessity) doesn’t mean that everyone has adjusted without incident.

If you’re using SQL Sentry regularly, there’s a great event management feature that provides a lot of value for our advanced users. I often find the SQL Sentry Event Calendar isn’t being used as often as it once was. The Event Calendar lets you view historical and future events, drill down into event failures, and reschedule jobs using drag and drop all from within the SQL Sentry desktop client. In addition, you can create custom views of events you need to reference frequently.

Kafka is a distributed, highly available event streaming platform which can be run on bare metal, virtualized, containerized, or as a managed service. At its heart, Kafka is a publish/subscribe (or pub/sub) system, which provides a "broker" to dole out events. Publishers post events to topics, and consumers subscribe to topics. When a new event is sent to a topic, consumers that subscribe to the topic will receive a new event notification.

IT Operations teams are often the bedrock of the digital business, ensuring that processes and services continue humming smoothly as developers continue to evolve and increase customer value. But increasingly complex systems can flood them with alerts that get in the way of operators from doing their best work and paving the way for new, innovative services.

The importance of network documentation becomes very clear when you have to sit down and troubleshoot a network from top to bottom. Or when there’s a changing of the guard at your company. New management wants to see what you’re doing with your network. Or new IT staff need to be brought up to speed quickly.