Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world and list ways to explore these trends. This week, we explore ways in which IT admins can optimize the IT infrastructure during the holidays while leaving room for enjoyment. December is here, and the holiday spirit is in the air. While you prune your Christmas tree at the start of the holiday season, your IT infrastructure requires consistent pruning throughout the year by IT admins.

The scene is familiar to any IT operations professional: the dreaded 3 AM call, multiple monitoring tools showing conflicting status indicators, and teams pointing fingers instead of solving problems. For managed service providers (MSPs) supporting hundreds or thousands of customers, this challenge multiplies exponentially. But at AWS re:Invent 2024, Synoptek’s team revealed how they’ve fundamentally transformed this reality for their 1,200+ customer base through AI-powered observability.

Today’s IT teams face unprecedented challenges as they manage increasingly complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments and vast amounts of data. The pressure to maintain uptime, optimize performance, and ensure security – all while balancing limited resources – has become a daunting task for even the most seasoned professionals. So how can these organizations stay ahead of the curve?

When we launched our fully-featured Microsoft Teams integration in May, our goal was clear: to provide enterprise teams with the robust and comprehensive toolset they need to manage incidents faster and more effectively – right where they work. It’s all part of our commitment to building the leading enterprise incident management solution. Today, we’ve enhanced our Teams integration by adding the ability to automatically create Microsoft Teams group chats directly from your Runbooks.

Are your IT systems underperforming due to incomplete or outdated data? In ITOps, where quick and accurate decision-making is critical, raw data alone can limit efficiency. Data enrichment adds the context needed to turn basic data into a powerful source of actionable insights.

At ilert, one of the key tools in our debugging process is the Event Explorer, which provides an extensive overview of incoming events and their processing lifecycle. By reflecting the event process of an alert source, the Event Explorer allows our team to trace event paths, correlate related data, and identify issues quickly.

On December 11, 2024, millions of users around the globe experienced disruptions across Meta’s core platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Reports of connectivity issues and outages began flooding social media and third-party monitoring platforms as users scrambled to understand what was happening. While Meta issued a statement later in the evening attributing the outage to unspecified “technical issues,” the delayed acknowledgment left countless businesses and users in the dark.

There was a lot going on at November’s Gartner Infrastructure, Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference, but the central theme was inevitably the transformational impact of the AI revolution. IOCS is a major event bringing together leading vendors and thousands of practitioners for a mix of vendor-led sessions, expert presentations, keynotes, roundtables and one-to-one consultations.

Today, computers are more sophisticated, interconnected and complex than ever. This means they’re more capable than ever – but it also comes with a downside: that their attack surface is larger than ever, leading to an elevated risk of cyber incidents. Therefore, your approach to managing vulnerabilities needs to be holistic and prepare for all the ways in which vulnerabilities could cause damage to users, systems or your organization’s operations and reputation.