Imagine for a moment that you have suddenly been promoted from regular old developer to senior architect, and tasked with overseeing the telemetry efforts for all of the engineering teams at your organization. I recently had a conversation at DevOps Days Toronto with someone who was living through exactly that experience. He’d just been put in … Read more Choosing Metrics that Matter (Beyond CPU/Disk/Network)
Virtualization management requires mastering a specific set of skills. But once mastered, these essential skills can lead to a long and meaningful career in IT. IT pros need a foundation in technologies. To extend utility to their organizations, they should further develop three essential skills – monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting. Think back to your first responsibilities as an … Read more Virtualization Monitoring Management Guide
The world may run on coffee, but it’s the alarm clock that gets us out of bed. It operates on a simple threshold. You set the time that’s important to you and receive an alert when that variable is true. Like your alarm clock, today’s tooling for web service alerting often operates on simple thresholds, … Read more No Need to Be Alarmed: Crafting an Effective Alert Strategy
I think we’ve all had that moment at 3:00am on over the weekend when we wish our monitoring and management systems would just shut up. The UPS in rack 4’s battery life is at 40%, we GET it. But we’ve also had that moment when we tilt our head a bit looking at a monthly … Read more Are You Getting Full Benefit of your IT Monitoring Tools?
Virtualization is supposed to provide consolidation and high availability benefits for applications. So what is a hypervisor? Why are there two types of hypervisors? What’s the difference between VMware® vSphere™ and Microsoft® Hyper-V®? What exactly are Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors? What if I just want to learn about vSphere and Hyper-V so that I can compare … Read more Comparing vSphere and Hyper-V
I need to learn this. I get that feeling from time to time. Maybe you have experienced it too. For me, it happens when I know there is a better way to do things and I feel there isn’t enough time to stop and learn. It actually happened a few weeks ago. We have a large … Read more Timeline Profiling with Chrome DevTools
Chances are good that you’ve encountered the “build versus buy” dilemma at some point in your professional career. With the increased popularity of hosted IT and developer-facing SaaS, the decision to outsource IT functions or build and maintain them in-house is more complicated than ever. Unfortunately, many decision makers still allow their decisions to be … Read more Monitoring Software: Build vs. Buy
Help desk software helps companies resolve tech issues faster, eliminating menial tasks and allowing IT departments to resolve complaints more efficiently. Through the organization of information, streamlined workflows, and the elimination of time-consuming manual processes, support specialists can focus on what they do best: addressing requests that demand their particular expertise. Too often, help desk … Read more Who Benefits the Most from Your Help Desk Tool?
Amazon CloudWatch is a popular option for collecting system and performance metrics from your AWS resources. For some services, it’s the only means available to collect badly needed metrics data. CloudWatch makes it trivially easy to fetch core system metrics like CPU, Network, and Disk, as well as more specialized metrics like queue-sizes and latency … Read more How To Make CloudWatch AWSome
The quality of the customer service your company provides cannot only make or break your reputation; it can have a significant impact your bottom line. According to the [24]7, Inc. 2016 Customer Engagement Report, almost half (47%) of customers would take their business to a competitor within a day of experiencing poor customer service, and … Read more Three Simple Tools for Improving Customer Service