To improve reliability, we need to measure it, and to measure it we use SLOs (Service Level Objectives). Or at least, that’s what Google SRE has popularized. In practice, it can be difficult and time-consuming to identify the right things to measure, to get to the right data, and to surface the results in a way that engages the stakeholders and teams involved. And all this is especially hard as we scale our teams and applications across multiple technology stacks.

In a world of monolithic applications and microservices, responding to incidents can be a painful process, involving multiple people with siloed knowledge jumping between different tools to find the relevant data and take action. Individuals within a business often hold the knowledge of how a particular component works, or how it depends on other services. The key to successfully responding to incidents is unlocking this knowledge and breaking down the silos between teams.

We are happy to announce that we have released a brand-new SCOM Management Pack for monitoring Citrix Desktop as a Service (DaaS). Citrix DaaS is a Citrix Cloud service that allows you to securely deliver virtual apps and desktops from on-premise data centers and public cloud platforms in a hybrid deployment.

SquaredUp Cloud has been in development for over two years (we first previewed it at SquaredUp Live, Spring 2021). It continues our mission to unlock and summarize data – think of it like “BI for engineering”. In building SquaredUp Cloud, we drew upon what we’ve learned with our Microsoft solutions over the last ten years, and built a solution independent of any one tool, like SCOM.

Although there are many great tools out there to get on top of application monitoring, there’s one vital metric that’s often overlooked by us technical folks – cost. In the days of running apps on servers in private datacenters, the kit was a one-time purchase that the systems team had to deal with. But running apps in public clouds is a different story. Whether you’re running on VMs, containers in Kubernetes, or entirely serverless, execution of your code adds to the bill.

It's not like it used to be back in the day! Before CI/CD, we were building on-premises, service-oriented products following system style architecture and we were able to map out the build system and end-to-end process in a PowerPoint or Visio document. Although time-consuming and inefficient, it was relatively straightforward and the build pipeline was unlikely to change drastically. But that's no longer the case.

We know there are a couple of dashboard solutions for which integration with SCOM can or could be created. However none of them integrates better and more easily than SquaredUp Dashboard Server for SCOM. It integrates with the SCOM platform out-of-the-box, leverages the SCOM object model to the fullest and is very easy to create dashboards with. For most use cases you do not even have to create dashboards, as the product comes with many out-of-the-box community dashboard packs.

Project managing global software projects is always a challenge, contending with multiple time zones, tools, and teams. In these environments, the day-to-day life of a Project Manager is filled with status collections, project reporting, and little time for much else. While the detail will always matter – like team bug data, feature status, and build progress – there is a better way than collecting and reporting on all this data manually. Does this scenario sound familiar?