Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The renowned German manufacturing magazine “Factory Innovation” recently conducted a comprehensive practical test on four leading alarm notification software for industrial manufacturing in their latest issue (01/23). The four alarming systems that were evaluated include: the Alarm Control Center from Alarm IT Factory (a spin-off of Siemens AG), ALERT 4.0 from Micromedia, the Alarm and Information Portal (AIP) from VIDEC, and SIGNL4 from Derdack.

Communication carries more weight than ever before. Businesses are so much more connected to their customers given the number of mediums they can communicate through; Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and even TikTok. Because of this, it's essential to prioritize these lines of communication throughout your day-to-day. Some might even say that over-communicating is the best way forward. Why? No one likes a company that appears simply like a black box with zero insight into what's happening.

Ready, set, go: when it comes to customer service, it's a race against the clock. Customers expect lightning-fast responses and complete solutions to their problems. But what happens when your help desk can't keep up with the pace? The answer is simple: frustration, dissatisfaction, and potentially lost clients. That's why measuring and improving Time to Resolution (TTR) is crucial. As a customer, there's nothing more irritating than dealing with a slow or ineffective help desk.

The average cost of an IT outage is $12,900—per minute. And when it comes to a “significant outage,” organizations reported the average overall cost was a whopping $1,477,800. On the latest podcast episode of That’s great IT, I spoke with Scott Lee, AVP for infrastructure and ITOps at Arch Mortgage Insurance Company, part of Arch Capital Group, about how organizations can best navigate IT outages.

I’m a big fan of monolithic architectures. Writing code is hard enough without each function call requiring a network request, and that’s before considering the investment in observability, RPC frameworks, and dev environments you need to be productive in a microservice environment.