Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Reining in costs and ensuring your IT organization maximizes its technical ROI is a delicate balancing act of office politics and well-rooted processes. IT cost challenges tend to vary from business to business, but they have one thing in common: they’re all manageable. Taking the time to study the most common IT revenue black holes starts with developing an in-depth understanding of how each one can affect IT productivity and the business’s bottom line.

Single-page applications (SPAs) provide some significant benefits over multiple-page apps. For JavaScript developers using frameworks like React or Vue, they offer flexibility in moving application logic to the frontend, reducing the need for complex backend operations. For users, SPAs can provide a smooth experience with a highly interactive UI and fewer page loads. But, with increased sophistication, there are some tradeoffs.

In order to manage complex containerized applications, modern devops teams need to have deep visibility into the status of their Kubernetes resources. By listening directly to the Kubernetes API, the open source kube-state-metrics service generates key metrics about your Kubernetes objects, including pods, nodes, and deployments, which are essential for understanding the status and performance of your clusters.

Your feedback, current trends, and a good chunk of innovation are what shapes the current and future face of our solution. Read on to find out what is coming in 2021.

A big part of ensuring the availability of your applications is establishing and monitoring service-level metrics—something that our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team does every day here at Google Cloud. The end goal of our SRE principles is to improve services and in turn the user experience. The concept of SRE starts with the idea that metrics should be closely tied to business objectives. In addition to business-level SLAs, we also use SLOs and SLIs in SRE planning and practice.

“Well it works on my machine.” – The age-old catchphrase that developers used when the tester found an intermittent defect, today it’s often used when people run a Google Lighthouse test on their machine and it ends up showing wildly different results to what is being reported by the team.

What do Google’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and Rollbar have to do with each other? DORA identified four key metrics to measure DevOps performance and identified four levels of DevOps performance from Low to Elite. One way for a team to become an Elite DevOps performer is by focusing on Continuous Code Improvement.

If you want to improve your customer operations, your attention must turn to your NPS score. The Net Promoter Score for your organization should never be overlooked. This can provide you with vital insights into how your services are perceived by customers. Those actively attempting to improve their NPS scores should focus on improving customer operations. Those running customer-centric businesses recognize the undeniable importance of operating around their needs.

Deep specialization of IT administrators is a luxury only the largest organizations can typically afford. Smaller organizations rely on IT administrators with a more generalist skill set because they are—by necessity—responsible for a wide array of different technologies, and there simply isn’t time to specialize in the intricacies for any one of them. Yet modern IT is intricate.

You’re probably familiar with the many benefits of licensing software using a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model. The most frequently touted benefit is that you pay only for what you use when you use it. Additionally, you don’t have to worry about upgrading, or server maintenance, or security. That’s all taken care of. However, even using a SaaS model, you still need to monitor and manage costs, which can be a challenge if you are working with several suppliers.