Whether operations are running smoothly or you’re running into a number of hiccups, the question to IT is always the same – “What do we even pay you for?” Rather than viewing IT as a vital piece of the puzzle, organizations often view IT as a cost center, leading to warped perceptions of the importance of IT.
As the recruitment team here at Grafana Labs, we used to struggle to get a comprehensive view of our recruitment data. We had multiple sources of information, but it was difficult to pool that information so we could see the big picture and identify trends and patterns that could help us hire the right talent in a highly competitive market.
This article was originally published in The New Stack and is reposted here with permission. A consequence of living in a rapidly changing society is that the state of all systems changes just as rapidly, and with that comes inconsistencies in operations. But what if you could foresee these inconsistencies? What if you could take a peek into the future? This is where time-series data can help.
As the person on the front lines, you know that providing the best service possible can be what makes your ITSM organization succeed. Every day, you work to build the relationships that help your organization create value for end-users. However, when you have inefficient processes, you end up having to be the person responding to an upset user.
If you were asked to evaluate how good crews were at fighting forest fires, what metric would you use? Would you consider it a regression on your firefighters’ part if you had more fires this year than the last? Would the size and impact of a forest fire be a measure of their success? Would you look for the cause—such as a person lighting it, an environmental factor, etc—and act on it? Chances are that yes, that’s what you’d do.
Veteran programmer? Experienced application performance monitoring (APM) connoisseur? Whatever your specific tech chops, you know the importance of ensuring your applications are running optimally. Every minute a business app is down or slow to respond translates into lost revenue and frustrated customers. That’s why smart businesses rely on APM solutions to monitor and analyze their applications’ performance in real-time.
Every IT environment – whether it’s on-prem or in the cloud, and regardless of how it’s designed or what runs in it – is made up of endpoints. That’s why Endpoint Detection and Response, or EDR, has typically been one of the pillars of cybersecurity. EDR helps businesses monitor each of their endpoints for security risks so that they can detect problems before they escalate to other endpoints.
The whole point of our beloved networks is to deliver applications and services to real people sitting at computers. So, as network engineers, monitoring the performance and efficiency of our networks is a crucial part of our job. Flow data, in particular, is a powerful tool that provides valuable insights into what’s happening in our networks for ongoing monitoring and troubleshooting poor-performing applications.
