Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As the UK's most geographically diverse digital infrastructure provider, Pulsant champions regional thinking. Every day, there’s a push for technological innovation to go beyond the M25 and drive the brightest businesses nationwide. This has led to our focus on the Northern Powerhouse. We have invested extensively in data centres across Manchester, Rotherham and Newcastle.

If you’ve ever worked on a digital product—or just used one—you’ve probably heard this advice a million times: reduce friction. Make things fast. Make them seamless. Remove anything that slows users down. That’s solid advice. No one wants to fill out a form with 20 fields just to sign up for an app. Nobody enjoys a checkout process that feels like solving a puzzle. But here’s the thing: sometimes friction is actually a good thing.

Your team lead just dropped, "We need to set up a syslog server," and now you're wondering what you've signed up for. Syslog servers aren’t just another checkbox in your infrastructure; they’re the quiet workhorses that keep logs organized and accessible. When things go wrong, they help you connect the dots faster. Imagine this: It’s 3 AM, and alerts are flooding in. Your authentication service is failing, but the logs on that server show nothing unusual.

Ever found yourself staring at your terminal, wondering why a service won’t start? systemctl is the backbone of modern Linux service management, but if you’re new to it, it can feel overwhelming. This guide breaks it down—covering essential commands and advanced techniques in a clear, practical way. No unnecessary jargon, just the know-how you need to manage services with confidence.

If you’ve ever found yourself asking questions like: Why is my Internet acting weird? What is going on with the Wi-Fi? Is the network down for anyone else? Is everything down? Why is there weird behaviour with Teams and Outlook? When there is a network outage, what EXACTLY does that mean? How to troubleshoot/diagnose cause of Internet outages? How to tell if Internet outage is ISP or issues with my network? Why do I have intermittent Network Outages consistently lasting 30 seconds?

Cloud provisioning involves defining, setting up, and allocating cloud resources — such as compute power, networking, and storage — so they’re ready for use in your organization. Provisioning used to be slow and error-prone. Not anymore; it’s a streamlined, hands-off process now. But it doesn’t happen on its own. You need the right cloud provisioning tools to automate and optimize the process.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a suite of cloud storage services. Among the most widely adopted are Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS, known for their robust scalability, performance, and flexibility for a wide range of workloads. However, AWS also offers Amazon Elastic File System (EFS). This is a serverless file storage service for workloads that need shared, scalable storage for use with AWS services and on-premises resources.

In the microservices world, tracking down performance issues feels like solving a mystery with pieces scattered across dozens of systems. When users report slowness, your team needs answers fast—not hours of guesswork. Distributed tracing is emerged as the solution, but implementing it effectively requires more than just understanding the basics. This guide takes you beyond the fundamentals to show you how DevOps teams and SREs can build truly effective tracing strategies.

You've heard the term thrown around in meetups and Slack channels, but what exactly is full-stack observability? Simply put, you can see, understand, and quickly act on everything happening across your entire tech stack—from frontend user interactions to backend services, cloud infrastructure, and third-party integrations. Full-stack observability isn't just another tech buzzword. It's the difference between being blindsided by outages and catching issues before your users tweet about them.

Slow is officially the new down. That’s a major finding of The SRE Report 2025, with 53% of study respondents agreeing with this expression, and 44% stating “performance should be tracked against a service-level objective.”