Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Recently, I was asked to comment on “…what skills IT practitioners should plan to learn or improve as we head into 2021.” While a few of those thoughts appeared online I wanted to provide a bit more detail and context here. Before digging in, you should know I’ll answer this question twice. The second answer will be the IT-centric one everyone expects to hear. But the first answer is, in my opinion, more honest, accurate, and relevant.

The server operating system (OS) is dominated by two companies. Red Hat, the first one, dominates the open-source server market. While Windows, the second one, dominates the closed-source market. According to a 2018 study by T4, Microsoft controls 47.8% of the industry share, whereas Red Hat controls only 33.9% of the market. The remaining 18.3% is controlled by alternative server OSs. Windows server monitoring has become a hot topic.

Emerging technologies impact many areas of an organization, but their impact on staffing is often overlooked. It would be ideal for public sector organizations, and state governments, in particular, to be able to adopt new technologies and hire the appropriate staff quickly and easily to optimize operations. State government managers face barriers such as a lack of budget, limited resources, minimal training, and unclear priorities—impeding speedy adoption.

If you have a website, you should know about search engine optimization (SEO) and page speed. You may even have wondered about balancing page speed vs. SEO. From a user perspective, page speed matters to you personally because you get frustrated when you click a link and nothing appears to happen or when it takes ages before any information appears. But does it matter when it comes to SEO? Good question.

With DigitalOcean Monitoring, you can collect metrics for visibility, monitor Droplet performance, and receive alerts when problems arise in your infrastructure. Many users often want to extend this infrastructure monitoring with application-level monitoring. This means debugging issues requires expertise, familiarity with your product and infrastructure, and often the involvement of many people in various fields—all to chase down a single problem.

A cloud-first strategy can feel like a big jump from traditional setups. One of the benefits of a hybrid or on-premises strategy is you feel like you’re in control. You and your team know where your critical servers live. You can touch them. Your team understands your security processes, and you can easily verify security personnel follow them. Those are all significant benefits. However, a growing number of software teams are choosing to move to cloud-first strategies.

If you’re already using or planning to use AWS Lambda to run code without provisioning or managing servers, you’ll want to monitor your serverless applications with the new SolarWinds® AppOptics™ Lambda forwarder and APM agents. If you’re not using AWS Lambda, here’s what you need to know—it’s an event-driven, serverless computing platform by Amazon Web Services.

With IT technology continuing to rapidly evolve, networks are becoming increasingly complicated, sophisticated, and sizable. The accelerating growth rate of network technology is caused in part by the increased adoption of IoT, the cloud, and software-defined networking. In this environment, where technology is advancing with overwhelming speed, enterprises must adapt and be agile enough to manage network configurations for all their connected devices.

Performance reporting is an essential part of everything IT does, and the help desk is no different. But help desk reporting and metrics are particular to each organization. Ticket volume and incident types often depend on the nature of the business, and IT help desk managers must select a set of reporting criteria that helps monitor the unique value that their team provides. As this post will cover, there are some universal truths in help desk reporting.

Federal IT pros are experts at using quick fixes to keep costs down and save time, often because there’s no other option. They essentially leap from crisis to crisis instead of future-proofing the agency’s IT environment. Paying down technical debt is neither easy nor glamorous, but without this paydown, you’re creating a cyclical panic. For example, when you’re in technical debt, you run with what you’ve got until it breaks; when it breaks, you panic.