Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As an IT pro, you are your most valuable asset. Obviously, if you aren’t taking care of yourself, how can you be expected to perform with typical sustained, easy awesomeness? Are you able to extricate your IT self from the myriad reactive activities central to IT roles? It’s easy to proclaim taking care of yourself should always be your number one priority.

Modern enterprises must work to ensure their organization is focused on making employees feel heard and valued, and a key way to do this is through strong IT service management. We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating—today’s employees expect a similar service experience in the workplace that they encounter in their daily lives.

If you hang out around a particular segment of the SolarWinds® crowd, you’re likely to hear the story of how monitoring helped one former Head Geek™ score front row tickets to Aerosmith. This is not that story. This story was, however, inspired by that story. The original story involved the aforementioned Head Geek, Destiny Bertucci, using SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM) to monitor the ticket sales website.

Developers are the kingmakers. Millions of decisions made by tens of thousands of developers are ultimately responsible for the triumph or tragedy of IT. Developers for commercial vendors, open-source projects, cloud and software as a service (SaaS) solutions, managed service providers (MSPs), and internal teams make most technology decisions far upstream from IT pros. This essentially defines ops’ role as the crew who finds a way to make washing machines fly in formation.

Most of us have encountered a situation like the following at some point in our careers: something either isn’t working right or could be working better. You’ve been through the process to understand the problem and identify solutions. (Check out my blog post “4 Steps to Efficiently Solve Problems” if you’re still working on understanding the problem.) Now it’s time to pick a solution—and you can’t get stakeholders to agree on one.

When we talk about upgrades here at SolarWinds, we spend a lot of time discussing the beneficial features, performance, and capabilities you can gain. That’s not by accident. The honest-to-goodness truth is, the most compelling reason to upgrade ANYTHING—from our phone to our game console to our monitoring software—is because we’ll be able to do something both new and useful to us.

Innovation is widely accepted to be a great thing—think of all the new products, technologies, methodologies, services, etc. unveiled at any given time. At this point, you’re probably thinking, "This all sounds great! Why would someone be writing about a downside of innovation?" Innovation is great when it pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved and inspires people to build upon things others have built or dreamed of. But innovation is useless without adoption.

At the start of our enterprise cost containment series, Leon examined what cost containment is and why IT pros should care. Basically, you should care how your projects and work affect the business’s bottom line and should understand enough about it that you can communicate effectively with management. Even though you may not think about the business in this way most of the time, it directly affects your job.