Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Federal IT pros have tracked application performance for decades. Today’s environments are far more complex than they’ve ever been, particularly with the quick and steady rise of cloud computing, mobile devices, and remote work. This enhanced complexity demands an improved ability to collect and track application performance metrics to ensure things are operating as expected and needed. But not all federal IT pros have the time or knowledge to keep up with the demand.

Microsoft released its desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offering, WVD (Windows Virtual Desktop), to the general public in September 2019. The service runs on Azure and provides a multi-user version of Windows 10, a feature unavailable for on-premises deployments of Hyper-V. WVD is a free service for Microsoft customers with most types of Windows 10 Enterprise license, however, the subscription or PAYG Azure costs are additional, as are many components you may wish to add.

The Digital Workspace Survey conducted by eG Innovations and xenappblog is one of the largest surveys of its kind, generating over 1,050 responses from IT professionals around the world. 62% of the respondents worked for organizations using digital workspaces for their employees. The remainder came from various types of organizations providing support for digital workspaces. Below are just a few highlights from the report which is packed with insights.

Though you might use custom-made apps for many reasons, there’s only one reason you deploy them: off-the-shelf solutions just can’t get the job done. Whenever operations are too complex for a commercial application already in place or whenever a new kind of digital business is launched, a custom app is necessary. This is true no matter what the business model is.

The success of any digital workspace technology depends on the user experience and VMware Horizon is no exception. There are many aspects of user experience. When a user first connects, the logon must happen quickly. When the user launches a client application (e.g., Microsoft Outlook, Google Chrome, etc.), the application must be available for user interactions within seconds.

We are proud to announce the 1.0 release of the Elastic APM PHP Agent! If you are interested in this work, please try the agent and let us know how it works for you and what features you miss! The best way to give feedback and ask questions is in our discussion forum, or if you find an issue or you would like to submit a pull request, jump to our GitHub repository. The agent is Apache-licensed, and we are more than happy to receive contributions from the community!

A few years ago, monitoring was simple. We had all our servers somewhere in the data center; we just had to install a monitoring tool and gather all the data from every server. Things changed when we started moving to the cloud and then to containers. Today, we often need to monitor a variety of different sources. A “server” can be a physical machine, virtual machine, container, or even a serverless application. Therefore, our approach for monitoring needs to change.