IBM Integration Bus was one of the first messaging middleware applications to be developed and it has gone through many iterations to reach the stage we are at today with App Connect Enterprise. Like any software application, it has become more feature-rich as time has passed and each iteration has marked a new milestone in the capabilities that it has delivered. We will trace some of the evolutionary paths of IBM Integration Bus to see how it came to be where it is today.

One of the building blocks of messaging is, you guessed it, messages! But there are different kinds of messages: Commands and Events. So, what’s the difference? Well, they have very distinct purposes, usage, naming, ownership, and more!

Do you want to use Kafka? Or do you need a message broker and queues? While they can seem similar, they have different purposes. I’m going to explain the differences, so you don’t try to brute force patterns and concepts in Kafka that are better used with a message broker.

Many people wonder what the difference is between monitoring vs. observability. While monitoring is simply watching a system, observability means truly understanding a system’s state. DevOps teams leverage observability to debug their applications or troubleshoot the root cause of system issues. Peak visibility is achieved by analyzing the three pillars of observability: Logs, metrics and traces.

The volume of data that IT systems generate nowadays is overwhelming, and without intelligent monitoring and analysis tools, it can result in missed opportunities, alerts, and expensive downtime. However, with the advent of Machine Learning and Big Data, a new category of IT operations tool has emerged called AIOps. AIOps can be defined as the practical application of Artificial Intelligence to augment, support, and automate IT processes.

Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) is an umbrella term for the use of big data analytics, machine learning (ML) and other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to automate the identification and resolution of common IT issues. The systems, services and applications in a large enterprise produce immense volumes of log and performance data. AIOps uses this data to monitor assets and gain visibility into dependencies within and outside of IT systems.

A digital platform may have billions of messages flowing through it each day, with real-time updates considered the standard by customers and enterprises. Ensuring that messages aren’t duplicated or lost in the process is an arduous task, and one that is the focus of IBM MQ, an enterprise-grade messaging solution that has been on the market for over 25 years.

Data observability is a relatively new discipline in the fields of data engineering and data management. While many are familiar with the longstanding concepts of observability and monitoring in enterprise IT networks and infrastructure, data observability has only really come into the spotlight in the last two years. However, it has managed to turn a lot of heads in that short time.