Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

AWS offers a Compute Optimizer tool that uses machine learning to analyze your historical utilization metrics and then recommend optimal AWS resources to help you reduce costs and improve performance. And it is free, you just need to opt in to the service in the AWS Compute Optimizer Console. Sounds great, right? Well, yes and no. It is a useful little tool, but if you do not understand its pros and cons, you will not be as optimized as you may think. Here is a breakdown.

Just how smart is your storage management? Storage is one of the most promising ways to shift from the "more is better" philosophy to the "work smarter" philosophy. What do I mean by that? Historically, IT managers who needed more storage responded in the most obvious way: they bought more. Then they deployed it, integrated it, and waited until the problem recurred.

Technology has paved the way for businesses to reach out to more customers and clients. One of the most effective ways to reach more people is through the Internet, by creating a great website. Nowadays, businesses with websites have a name and face in the online world. However, as technology advances, so do security risks. If hackers get into a website, they can steal sensitive data – say, customer information (i.e., payment methods, addresses, etc.).

Contextual Code specializes in enterprise-level projects for state government agencies. We routinely tackle difficult web content management implementations, migrations, integrations, customizations, and operations. We know what it takes to get a project off the ground and onto the web. We use Upsun as our primary hosting platform because it’s incredibly flexible and it provides a vast list of services that can be set up very easily.

Like much of the workforce, IT help desk teams have spent the past year implementing new tools and processes to adapt to the new world of hybrid work. Many, for example, have turned to virtual agents, AI-powered enterprise chatbot tools that allow employees to quickly resolve common IT issues. Yet, despite the promise of virtual agents, many IT teams still find themselves manually handling everyday incidents. Some of the most common are virtual application and desktop session “resets.”

When you’re running databases at scale, finding performance bottlenecks can often feel like looking for a needle in a haystack. In any troubleshooting scenario, you need to know the exact state of your database at the onset of an issue, as well as its behavior leading up to it.

Black Hat USA is one of the industry’s oldest and most well-established security events. Last year, the conference was held virtually for the first time in its history. This year’s conference brought together the best of both worlds, with a hybrid event that was held virtually and in person in Las Vegas. Historically, Black Hat has seen about 20,000 attendees at its in-person conference.

Robotic data automation (RDA) is designed to optimize IT functions for a broad spectrum. It is the next generation data automation technology that is specifically designed to bring efficiencies to multiple IT functions including CXO/IT leaders decision making, IT Ops, Helpdesk, Salesforce.com, ServiceNow and other applications used by enterprises.

This blog is the fourth in a four-part series on infrastructure automation for government agencies that are modernizing digital systems while grappling with budget and staffing constraints and the challenges of COVID-19. Read the third post here. For government agencies, continuous modernization is quickly becoming the norm. And, in light of COVID-19, modernizing in cloud environments is now a mission-critical imperative.

Have you ever found yourself late at night combing through a myriad of logs attempting to determine why your cluster went down? Yes, that’s a really stressful job, especially when you think about how much money your company loses as a result of these incidents. Gartner estimates that the revenue lost due to outages is around $5,600/minute, which amounts to more than $330K/hour.