Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

ITIL 4 value streams have become a hot new topic for ITSM teams all over the world. The latest version of ITIL may have caused a learning curve for IT professionals and left a lot of room for discussion and elaboration. Value streams are not new; in fact, the concept has been around since as early as the beginning of the 20th century in Ford’s factories. Now, ITIL 4 has leveraged value streams as a core concept in an attempt to deliver value to all stakeholders.

If you’ve worked with load testing before, you know that there are a lot of things to consider. Whether or not you should combine load testing and mocks is one of those considerations. Getting to the answer requires knowledge of your infrastructure and your development procedures, which will all influence what questions you need to ask yourself.

One of the most needlessly time-consuming tasks that your team members can engage in is looking for information on work that has already been done by somebody else. Perhaps a developer is seeking to perform an oft-repeated task like the creation of a new microservice. Or a new employee on the team needs guidance regarding designing a product roadmap and wants to look at one that was made for a similar project.

At our recent InfluxDays event, Gary Fowler discussed the current state of scripting and query language support in InfluxDB. This is an aspect of the platform undergoing constant development, so here’s a quick recap of what Gary went over.

Organizing a software release is a cross-team effort and a large undertaking. Leveraging the power of Mattermost Playbooks can help your team stay on deadline and keep confusion at bay. In this post, we’ll learn how to quickly integrate Mattermost into your GitLab release pipeline to help streamline your release processes. At the end of the blog post, there’s a link to a release management demo that you can try out in the browser to see these ideas in action.

AWS re:Invent has come and gone. A great deal of fun was had along with many new insights shared. Here’s a recap from some ScienceLogicians who were in attendance.

Incident Commanders play a crucial role in the successful operation of IT service management (ITSM) teams. By applying best practices, they can ensure that incidents are handled quickly and efficiently, so that downtime for end users is kept to a minimum. ‍ This article provides an overview of the requirements for an effective Incident Commander in ITSM. It discusses the skills and competencies needed for effective incident management, and highlights some best practices for this role.

Microsoft Teams Phone is a powerful collaboration and communication tool, making the use of Teams easier and more flexible than ever. Many businesses want to grab the benefits of an easy-to-manage platform that flexibly supports the complexities of their existing operations, incorporating PSTN calling. But before you dive in, what are the key things you should know?

Over the last few years, the Grafana open source project has grown at an eye-watering pace, with more than 1 million active Grafana instances now in the wild. With that growth, our processes have had to run to keep up. This is especially true when it comes to how frequently we release new versions of Grafana. Currently we cut.

As today’s enterprises shift to the cloud, Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto platform for running containerized microservices. And while Kubernetes operates as a single cluster, enterprises inevitably run their applications on a complex, often confusing, architecture of multiple clusters deployed to a hybrid of multiple cloud providers and private data centers. This approach creates a lot of problems. How do your services find each other? How do they communicate securely?