Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Welcome to the second part of our three-part blog series on leveraging analytics to deliver an exceptional end-user experience. In the last part, we discussed two key points: how to gauge the effectiveness of your support forms using analytics, and how to pick the right metrics that focus on customer satisfaction. In this part, we’ll discuss the next two ways analytics can help you deliver an exceptional end-user experience.

From containerized workloads to microservice architectures, developers are rapidly adopting new technology that allows organizations to scale their products at unprecedented rates. In order to make sense of these complex deployments, many teams are abstracting applications away from the environments in which they run. Because of this trade-off, developers and security teams lose the access to the unified context from infrastructure to application needed to fully secure their services.

I recently found out Travis CI is ending its free-for-opensource offering, and looked at the alternatives. I recently got badly burned by giving an external CI service access to my repositories, so I am now wary of giving any service any access to important accounts. Github Actions, being a part of Github, therefore looked attractive to me. I had no experience with Github Actions going in. I have now spent maybe 4 hours total tinkering with it.

The Kinsing attack has recently been reported by security researchers, and it is well known for targeting misconfigured cloud native environments. It is also known for its comprehensive attack patterns, as well as defense evasion schemes. A misconfigured host or cluster could be exploited to run any container desired by the attacker. That would cause outages on your service or be used to perform lateral movement to other services, compromising your data.

Elasticsearch was designed to allow its users to get up and running quickly, without having to understand all of its inner workings. However, more often than not, it’s only a matter of time before you run into configuration troubles. Elasticsearch is open-source software that indexes and stores information in a NoSQL database and is based on the Lucene search engine. Elasticsearch is also part of the ELK Stack.

For those on an ITIL journey, ServiceNow appears to be the service to beat. ServiceNow has tremendous flexibility and thousands of different workflows to support your business. And if you’re using SCOM to populate your CMDB, you’re leaps and bounds ahead of the average organization. Sadly, that flexibility comes with the cost of being stuck inside of the ServiceNow web interface.

In the first of our new technical blogs, Solution Architect Cameron Parry explains how network and cloud architects can effectively use Console Connect within their hybrid and multi-cloud environments. More than 20 years ago, Peter Deutsch and James Gosling outlined the eight fallacies of distributed computing.

Fiber optic cables carrying massive amounts of information on pulsating beams of light are a critical part of the physical infrastructure supporting our digital society. By their nature, these cables are highly exposed, spanning huge distances in territories beyond the control of a network operator whether underground, under water or on aerial cables, and popping up in equipment huts.

A networking problem can come from almost any fault within the infrastructure, whether it’s a bandwidth bottleneck, configuration issues, or a faulty networking component. But more than half of IT system outages are caused by hardware failure. The ability to quickly identify and resolve hardware issues goes a long way toward ensuring optimized performance. While this may seem like a simple solution, there are many, many potential hardware failure points, each of which can contribute to a slowdown.

One benefit of the lockdown triggered by the coronavirus epidemic has been a renewed enthusiasm for working at home. Forced to let millions of employees work from home to avoid contagion, companies that had been hesitant about taking this step have concluded they can benefit from moving to a remote workforce.