Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Toil — endless, exhausting work that yields little value in DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) — is the scourge of security engineers everywhere. You end up with mountains of toil if you rely on manual effort to maintain cloud security. Your engineers spend a lot of time doing mundane jobs that don’t actually move the needle. Toil is detrimental to team morale because most technicians will become bored if they spend their days repeatedly solving the same problems.

In order to manage the impact that every entity has on your IT environment, an accurate Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is essential. This tool provides the visibility you need to quickly execute tasks like daily management, determining how to fix an outage, and planning major initiatives like cloud migrations or application changes. To create and maintain an accurate CMDB, automated dependency and discovery mapping (DDM) is key.

As the landscape continues to become more challenging, it's safe to say automation is the future of manufacturing. Changing customer demands, supply chain constraints and pressure for faster turnaround are some of the realities that companies face. This has predicated an industry agnostic need for a hands off approach to manufacturing. SAP for manufacturing offers a transformative end to end manufacturing process for more resilient, future ready enterprises.

puppetlabs-pe_status_check is a new supported module for Puppet Enterprise. It provides a series of indicators of system status that the Puppet Support team has determined to avoid support incidents or outages. Utilizing this module and the accompanying documentation will allow the user to craft preventative maintence workflows and, should it still be required, increase the quality of information in any support ticket, to help decrease the time to resolution for any incident.

Coming up in StackStorm 3.7.0 is a new feature that allows administrators of a StackStorm installation to “override” the default resource status that was specified by the pack owners. One of the benefits of StackStorm is the large variety of packs available on the StackStorm Exchange. But sometimes, users may not want the default content status provided by the community packs. We’re introducing a new feature into StackStorm 3.7.0 to make this easier to manage.

Your Puppet Enterprise (PE) installation’s primary job is to compile catalogs and send them to agents to be enforced. When you deploy code, all catalog compilation stops and waits for the code deploy to complete. This impacts performance in any installation, and the impact escalates with more frequent code deployments. Code deployments usually increase when you use Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise, making the impacts of stopped catalog compilations even more apparent.