Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ideally, observability should help you understand the state of your application and how it performs under different circumstances. However, while serverless observability may seem similar to serverless monitoring and testing, the three achieve different goals. Testing helps you check your application for known issues, and monitoring helps you evaluate system health according to known metrics. Observability helps you search and discover unknown issues, providing end-to-end visibility.

Whether you've recently migrated to the cloud, or you've been operating there for awhile now, you've likely realized how challenging it can be to understand exactly where your cloud spend goes and what drives your costs. Using a cloud service provider can offer many benefits, like the ability to easily scale up and down based on need, but unless you're using the right services and tools, your costs can quickly spiral out of control.

The South Dakota Bureau of Information and Telecommunications (BIT) provides quality customer services and partnerships to ensure South Dakota’s IT organization is responsive, reliable, and well-aligned to support the state government’s business needs. The BIT believes that “People should be online, not waiting in line.” The bureau’s goals for the state's 885,000 residents include.

Our human capacity for ingesting information and acting on it, is constant. As the systems we operate grow more complex, we need to make sure we use technology that presents us with only the relevant information we need, exactly when we need it. In aviation, this lesson was learned long ago, and now IT Ops is catching up.

Companies all over the world are realizing that to look professional to their users they need to take control of how they communicate system incidents or maintenance updates. The best way of course to do this is through a beautifully presented status page.

In the beginning, there was the Log – or to be a bit more precise, there were application logs. At least that's how it was in the early days of application development, when raw log data itself was more often than not the point where troubleshooting began. Now, of course, the starting point for troubleshooting with cloud-based applications is much more likely to be an automatically-generated alert, or an indication on a monitoring dashboard that something isn't quite right.

In early 2020, threat actors breached the build systems of Solarwinds and used this access to add malicious code into one of SolarWinds products. The product, called “Orion”, is very widely used and deployed by tens of thousands of companies, including many Fortune 500 companies.

Microsoft Azure is the fastest growing cloud platform at the moment. Many organizations use Microsoft Azure to quickly build and deliver cloud services that can scale or to migrate existing workloads to the cloud. However, larger and faster cloud services can quickly increase the complexity of a network. To solve this and ensure business-critical workloads run correctly, IT teams need deep visibility into their Azure environments.

Headquartered in the Netherlands, BCD Travel manages global business travel. It operates in 109 countries with annual revenues totaling $25 billion and employs nearly 11,000 people worldwide. To meet the current and future needs of a growing virtual workforce, the Network Operations Center (NOC) group at BCD Travel had to adapt and scale its IT infrastructure operations. Additional capabilities were needed to monitor Microsoft 365, Azure, Active Directory, AWS, Teams, and other critical SaaS services.