Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Many of you know me from my various community-facing roles during my tenure at Puppet. I'm now taking on some new challenges as our Community and Developer Relations Lead and I'm thrilled about it. I'm definitely not the first to say this, but Puppet's community is truly incredible. The level of engagement, commitment, and collaboration never ceases to astound me. When someone new shows up in our Slack, there's always a helpful suggestion or a link to docs or a Forge module that helps solve a problem.

The management of modern software environments hinges on the three so-called “pillars of observability”: logs, metrics and traces. Each of these data sources provides crucial visibility into applications and the infrastructure hosting them. For many IT operations and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams, two of these pillars — logs and metrics — are familiar enough.

In our Green initiative effort, Upsun is exposing all necessary information via an open API about the carbon footprint of our regions, so that you can make informed choices on where to deploy your projects.

Edua Dickerson, vice president of ESG and finance strategy at ServiceNow, co-authored this blog. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns are rapidly rising to the top of the corporate agenda. Not only is ESG a corporate responsibility, but it’s also a win-win for enterprises. By embracing sustainability, ethical labor practices, and effective processes and controls, organizations are laying the groundwork for increased value creation, according to McKinsey.

Maintenance is an important aspect that several organizations ignore. As a result, organizational assets do not work properly, asset failure occurs, and asset performance is not up to the mark. These types of scenarios are quite common when assets do not get maintenance on time. That is why organizations must not ignore maintenance. In fact, they should provide proactive maintenance to their assets which is helpful in minimizing maintenance expenses.

While Financial Operations (FinOps) isn’t a new concept, it is becoming more prevalent in companies that have started seeing increases in their cloud spend. Historically, when engineers needed to set up infrastructure to complete a project, they had to go through a long process of procuring servers, finding space in a data center, and getting financial approval. This process could take two months or more, so it allowed plenty of time for oversight by the financial department.

Data center automation is expected to rapidly change the data center industry. Look at any data center industry publication, website, or event and there will be plenty of content predicting what data center automation is going to look like. Data center professionals are curious on how automation is going to change their jobs and data center management. The truth is that we already know.

Digital dexterity is a fundamental attribute within the most successful workforces – and will only become more essential as businesses enter the rapidly approaching future workplace. Yet, many businesses struggle to assess and promote this vital skill among their own employees. The increasing value of digital dexterity is due in large part to the digitization of the workplace, which was well underway prior to the pandemic..

Data breaches and ransomware attacks are increasing exponentially. The number of data breaches reported per year has increased nearly 70% in the past five years. Eighty-five percent of IT decision makers report having suffered at least one ransomware attack over the same period. Organizations that fall victim to these breaches and attacks experience system downtime, damaged reputations, IP loss and other ill effects that lead to lost business.

Whether you’ve heard of or fully jumped on the DevOps or SRE bandwagon, you may have also wondered how the two relate. What’s the difference? Are they really just different ways of looking at the same problem? The term DevOps hit the market first, but SRE wasn’t too far behind. And though they have different origin stories, they both focus on autonomy, automation, and iteration. So why do these paradigms exist? And why do we need both? Let’s look at this further.