Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As business systems grow to encompass more locations, tools, and organizations, defining processes that keep pace with these changes can’t be left to a hodgepodge of disconnected programs—or worse, manual implementation of paper documentation. You need to automate. Automation within businesses first arose in the 1960s, alongside resource planning systems.

Telegraf is a very powerful open source plugin-based agent that gathers data from stacks, sensors, and systems and sends it to a database. It collects data from an input and sends it to an output, and gives you the option to transform data with aggregators and processors before it reaches its endpoint.

SLOs—or Service Level Objectives—can be pretty powerful. They provide a safety net that helps teams identify and fix issues before they reach unacceptable levels and degrade the user experience. But SLOs can also be intimidating. Here’s how a lot of teams feel about them: We know we want SLOs, we’re not sure how to really use them, and we don’t know how to debug SLO-based alerts. Don’t worry, we’ve got your answer—observability!

The first keynote speaker for GitKon 2022, a virtual tech conference for the global Git community, has been announced: Dries Buytaert, Co-founder/CTO of Acquia and founder of Drupal. His session: From the dorm room to The White House – How Drupal grew and became the standard for open source web experiences will tell the story of how Dries was able to achieve commercial success ultimately by embracing open source.

On a fairly regular basis, users will post to Reddit or Spiceworks or another IT forum to ask about the best support staff ratio of techs to users, and what other companies are finding sustainable. The question usually comes from an overworked tech who’s drowning in tickets and trying to understand what’s considered. The answers can get interesting. On Spiceworks, many people responded with details about the environments they support—and the range was notable.

Standard operating procedures—more commonly known as SOPs—are written, step-by-step instructions that describe how to perform a routine activity. While you can create an SOP for anything, an MSP SOP that outlines technical procedures is a well-known path to increasing efficiency in your business. Whether you’ve got existing MSP SOPs you’re interested in updating, or you’re looking for some basic steps to build brand-new SOPs around, you’ve come to the right place.

I speak to a lot of MSPs every day, and I’m always asked for advice on meeting new prospects. Finding new clients is one of the biggest challenges they all face. “Have you tried asking your existing clients for referrals?” is my stock answer. And for good reason—prospects referred to you by an existing client are four times more likely to buy than any other opportunities. Here are a few of my tips on how to generate client referrals from existing clients.

Does it seem like everyone’s talking about Zero Trust? Maybe you know everything there is to know about Zero Trust, especially Zero Trust for container security. But if your Zero Trust initiatives are being met with brick walls or blank stares, maybe you need some help from Gartner®. And they’ve got just the thing to help you explain the value of Zero Trust to your leadership; It’s called Quick Answer: How to Explain Zero Trust to Technology Executives.

Terraform and Pulumi are both Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools. They allow you to manage, provision, and configure your infrastructure using code, which makes it easy to automate your infrastructure deployments and manage them in a version control system. Terraform is an open source tool developed by Hashicorp. It’s popular among developers because it’s easy to use and has a wide range of community-developed plugins and integrations.