It may seem a bit strange, but recently I’ve been asked about Return on Investment (ROI) calculators a fair amount. Generally the discussion is if a given vendor should (or should not) have an ROI calculator on their website. Some reasons for justifying an ROI calculator include making it easier for potential clients to understand the value they will receive from a solution and the basic cost involved.
IT Service Management (ITSM) tools are for many organizations the lifeblood of the help desk and possibly the entire IT department. Some would argue these tools are the lifeblood of the entire organization, as well. Many IT departments live and die by their IT Service Management tools, using them to track everything from support tickets to change control requests, provisioning and de-provisioning of resources and more.
Every organization has business objectives (BO). These objectives can focus on numerous areas across the company and be related to almost anything within the organization: Identifying core objectives is important for the ongoing success of organizations. Objectives help keep organizations focused on what is deemed important for the future, which, of course, differs for each organization.
Productivity is one of the measures economists use when looking at the health of and growth (or lack thereof) of economies. Productivity growth is the ability of people to do more with the same or only marginally more effort. So, when Henry Ford introduced his assembly line to automobile manufacturing, he dramatically increased employee productivity. In the case of Henry Ford, the benefits of massive increases in productivity included.
Teams meeting not loading? Outlook mailbox not refreshing? Imagine starting Monday morning with either of the above two issues. It can certainly hinder anyone’s work schedule. Microsoft Teams, Sharepoint, Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services have become essential in day to day work life. An outage in any of these services causes panic among the workforce, followed by questions on whether the trouble is their system or the application.
Alert noise, as well as false positives or too few alerts, undermine the effectiveness of any monitoring solution. Inaccurate alerts condition users to draw poor conclusions. Too many alerts contribute to serious alerts going undetected. Too many false positive or non-actionable alerts cause the significance of all alerts to diminish over time. And too few alerts can lead to misreading system performance and missing critical problems.
I’m not going to lie, I have a strong hatred towards the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF). There are a lot of reasons mainly having to do with having to support BPF on a network monitoring tool. There’s also the challenge of writing BPF filters and the weird way they work. So when I first heard about eBPF, I was more than a little reluctant to be excited. As I dug in further, I became much more excited about the technology and the benefits it can bring. So, what is eBPF then?
Wouldn’t it be great if there was some attribute you could query and set on a device? Then you could automagically configure that device based on that attribute that you just set for fully automated device onboarding! Welcome to Dynamic Device Attribute Pollers and Auto-Configuration Parameters! Rolls right off the tongue doesn’t it?
If you ask the experts, they will tell you that companies have too many IT tools for monitoring their environments. Monitoring tools for network, infrastructure, application, wireless, endpoint, cloud, etc. proliferate all organizations. According to research by Gartner, more than a third of organizations surveyed have more than 30 monitoring tools. More than half of organizations surveyed have at least 11 tools. Sounds like a good argument for IT tool rationalization. But is this really the case?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days. Everywhere you look, companies are promising to solve your ills by applying AI to whatever problem you’re trying to solve. It doesn’t seem to matter what area you are in; medical, research, education, technology, software or anything else. Someone, somewhere is offering an AI-based tool that will solve all your problems.
