After joining the product management team at LogicMonitor - I was instantly drawn toward pushing improvements to our user interface (UI). After years of growth and agile development LogicMonitor’s UI had taken a toll, a common challenge across rapidly growing software companies. But where do we start and how do we make improvements that streamline workflows and increase productivity for our users?

We live in a digital world, and it’s becoming more and more apparent every day. We rely on our smartphones to give us directions to where we need to go. We rely on email to share information with our colleagues, family and friends. We access our medical records through online portals. We even hail a rideshare through an app that connects us to drivers in locations across the globe.

SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) has grown over the last four years: from a concept spoken about only in forums and dimly lit DevOps departments to software that is littered across every IT company's flyer as their new cutting edge product. In 2017, NetworkWorld estimated that SD-WAN held less than 5% of the WAN market share but with the 59% annual growth in revenue for SD-WAN vendors, predictions for 2020 look to a $1.2 billion market.

Earlier this year we announced the official LogicMonitor - ServiceNow CMDB App, and it’s been exciting to see how quickly our customers are adopting the feature-rich integration. As with most workflow integrations across the LogicMonitor ecosystem, the CMDB App was built with customization in mind.

Companies around the world are going through digital transformation in some way or another. They are breaking monolithic applications into microservices for more natural development and deployment. Hashicorp Consul is one of the tools helping companies with this transformation. Consul helps with the shift of static infrastructure to dynamic infrastructure through service-based networking instead of host-based.

Hashicorp Vault is an open-source secret management tool that allows organizations to easily "secure, store and tightly control access to tokens, passwords, certificates, encryption keys for protecting secrets and other sensitive data using a UI, CLI, or HTTP API." This solution prevents sensitive information from being stored in unsecured places, and at times stored in plaintext, throughout the organization’s infrastructure.

If you’re a LogicMonitor customer, the platform’s Audit Logs may seem like a rudimentary means to track user actions, but they can actually be a powerful tool for troubleshooting and getting historical data within your portal. For instance, let’s say you notice that the alerting for a particular device group has been unexpectedly disabled.