As a consultant, what are you doing to stay on top of your game? In this ever-evolving field, it's critical to have access to the best tools on the market to power your business. Whether you are a one-man band or a consulting firm juggling multiple clients, leveraging the right tools and software solutions can make all the difference to your workflows and approach to productivity.

You're probably familiar with Splunk. It's one of the most popular big data solutions organisations worldwide use to monitor their systems in real-time. But you may not know that Splunk also offers synthetic monitoring solutions via 2 Steps. 2 Steps Synthetic Monitoring for Splunk is a powerful tool that can help you speed up your application troubleshooting process. Today we'll take a closer look at what it is and how it can benefit your organisation.

A seemingly straightforward technical problem can often have explosive consequences. Say a tech team restarts a cloud server overnight; those few minutes of downtime might trigger a problem elsewhere and cause your app to crash. The following morning, customers can't access your services, you're trending on social media for all the wrong reasons and your customer service reps are left to pick up the pieces. Scenarios like this prove the value of incident management. But you need best practices that ensure incident management does what it's supposed to do. Otherwise, it's just another buzzword. Here are some best practices for incident management that you need to incorporate into your tech organization.

It's that time of the year again, folks. Everyone's gazing at the crystal ball, hoping to get a fairly accurate preview of things to look out for in 2023. The ITOps world could definitely use one, as it seems to be trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy of innovation. There's so much happening that it's gradually becoming tougher to separate buzzwords from proven technology trends.

Have you ever visited a place like a library or a museum where the computer or tablet is only used for certain information or services? This is made possible through kiosk software. It allows a device to only access certain programs or applications. It prevents the device from accessing any other features or functions of the operating system.

Testing Kubernetes Ingress resources can be tricky, and can lead to frustration when bugs pop up in production that weren't caught during testing. This can happen for a variety of reasons, but with Ingress specifically, it often has to do with a misalignment between the data used in testing and the traffic generated in production. Tools like Postman can be a great way of generating traffic, but they have the drawback of being manually created. Not only is this unlikely to create all the needed variations for a single endpoint (different headers, different request bodies, etc.), it would be almost impossible to create all the needed variations, for all possible endpoints.

Hall of Fame professional wrestler Paul "Mr. Wonderful" Orndorff said of his ascent to become one of the WWE's biggest stars of the 1980s that, "I knew where I wanted to go. I had a plan. I don't care what you do in life, you better have a plan." And for ITOps teams making new plan-or adjusting the sails on their existing ones-it's good to have insights that inform those plans.