Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Where were you when VPN went from "nice to have for IT staff to remote in on the weekends" to "mission critical for the entire organization" almost overnight in March of 2020? Many companies were caught off-guard, with admins across the country taking a mad scramble to make sure their VPN solution is modern, sized to fit the demands of the remote workforce, and secure for their users.

We all remember a couple of biblical allegories here. That of the Good Samaritan, that of The Prodigal Son, that of an Aragonese with new Adidas and the trolleybus on line 8… But the one that interests us today is that of the most holy and bethlemite David, preceded by Saul and succeeded by Solomon, who, among his many achievements, managed to defeat the Philistine giant Goliath.

For you, one or more of these statements (and / or challenges) likely apply to you, and the organization for which you work. Which of these are you hearing or saying? Splunk can help you with these in many ways. Today, I am highlighting one way to address many of these statements, specifically with the Content Pack for Splunk Observability Cloud.

With the demand to meet service level agreements (SLAs), any on-call SRE can tell you that incidents always happen at the wrong time. Things break when you least expect them to (on a date, about to beat a new level in a video game, pizza delivery just arrived, asleep at 3am). During these inopportune moments, you want to make sure it's easy to get the data you need, no matter which device is nearby.

When measuring the success of large-scale transformations—particularly in the technology space—it’s natural to look at hard metrics, such as cycle time, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and so on. In IT, for example, hard metrics are what we do all day long. But within any organization, change is ultimately personal. In my experience, relying exclusively on hard numbers often leads you to ignore the human side of transformation, and sometimes even action the wrong things.

Deep in the woods, where trees are black and the air is thick, steam rises wistfully across the damp ground. A single dirt track, barely wide enough to pass, scars the terrain for what seems like an endless number of miles. It winds its way through the mountains and valleys, across a rickety bridge over a cavernous ravine, before plunging back into darkness, the trees bending over as if to grasp those passing through. Finally, in a small clearing, a lonely decrepit wooden cabin reveals itself.

A crucial part of effective package management is package distribution. Whether you are dealing with distributed development teams, deploying a distributed application or even if you are a software vendor, you need efficient, performant and reliable delivery of your software packages or artifacts. And for that, you need infrastructure. Lots of infrastructure. To deliver software globally, at low latencies, you’ll need infrastructure in many regions, preferably as many as possible.

For even the most successful IT organizations, providing innovative solutions is only half the battle. There’s one thing that matters above all else when it comes to solving IT problems: the perspective of the employees.