Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Software applications are increasingly critical for businesses today. They perform key customer-facing roles, power back-office activities, and help us gain greater insight into business activities. Using software gives us greater efficiency and leverage, but can come at a cost in terms of transparency. It can be hard to see how well customers are being served, where they are struggling, or understand why parts of the business aren't working as expected.

What do you think of a website that displays SSL/TLS certificate errors when you visit it? Most people abandon it in disappointment. A certain amount of trust and respect for the service is lost. After investing a lot of effort and time in getting users to visit your site, and the user finds the site down or showing a warning, it will result in having dissatisfied users. Moreover, if the downtime or warning is due to a security issue, it will also hurt your brand image.

I hate slow websites. They are annoying to use and frustrating to work on. But what does it mean to be “slow”? It used to be waiting for document load. Then waiting for page ready. But with so many asynchronous patterns in use today, how do we even define what “slow” is? The W3C has been working on this with the new Event Timing and Element Timing API, and has defined some new Web Vital metrics to describe the different ways that slow performance can impact a webpage.

On Monday September 28 a multi-hour global Microsoft 365 outage brought down Teams, Office 365 and Outlook leaving many people disconnected. While Microsoft outages are rare, there are a range of possible issues on your network and in your user’s environment that can cause service issues at any time. Knowing quickly when these are happening, and what’s causing them is key to keeping users productive on Microsoft 365.

Legacy generations of networks have predominately provided services with best-effort delivery. While this has worked for voice, text and best- effort broadband services, end users are hampered with buffering, delays, and drops as the demand for feature-rich services continues to grow.