Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In this lecture, we explore how to build a cost-effective IT procurement process. A well-designed procurement strategy ensures your organization acquires the right assets at the right price, while also considering long-term value, compliance, and vendor relationships. By focusing on both efficiency and foresight, procurement becomes more than just a purchase—it becomes a driver of IT and business success.

In this lecture, we look at vendor management best practices and how they impact the entire IT asset lifecycle. Effective vendor management goes beyond negotiating prices—it’s about building strong partnerships, ensuring compliance, and aligning vendor performance with your organization’s goals. By applying best practices, you can create more value from your vendor relationships and reduce risks tied to procurement and asset management.

In this episode of Pastries with SREs, we tackle an observability debated topic: Do you need a Single Pane of Glass OR is OpenTelemetry a better strategy? We explore: Additional Resources: About Elastic Elastic, the Search AI Company, enables everyone to find the answers they need in real time, using all their data, at scale. Elastic’s solutions for search, observability, and security are built on the Elastic Search AI Platform — the development platform used by thousands of companies, including more than 50% of the Fortune 500.

In this video, we discuss handling both old and new systems in IT environments. From legacy SNMP setups to modern telemetry, most organizations juggle multiple data sources, which can make observability feel overwhelming. We explore how to combine logs, metrics, and flow data into one system that provides actionable insights. You’ll see practical examples of simplifying scattered tools and making sense of complex, disparate information. Understanding how these different types of data work together is key to getting observability right.

As part of our mission to help developers "Start with Aiven", we built a new plugin to make working with Apache Kafka easier. The Kafka UI Connect plugin allows you to interact with your Kafka clusters directly from any JetBrains IDE (e.g., IntelliJ, PyCharm). No more juggling multiple applications!

Custom Metrics provide critical visibility into your environment and applications. In this video, we’ll show you how to govern Custom Metrics volumes in Datadog by: Building monitors to proactively catch usage spikes Identifying and attributing your largest cost drivers Reducing costs on less valuable, unused metrics.

The future of IT: Where will AIOps be in less than 5 years? In this video, we dive deep into the evolution of Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) and what the next half-decade holds for businesses, IT teams, and technology leaders. AIOps is no longer just a buzzword—it’s becoming a critical part of IT operations, enabling predictive analytics, automated incident management, root cause analysis, and faster decision-making.

Amin Momin of Capgemini gives an example of injecting faults to improve reliability with a capital market exchange.

The new Suggested Actions feature in BigPanda surfaces relevant historical data to help L1 network operation center operators quickly diagnose and resolve incidents. Request a personalized demo here to see more.

In this webinar, Nathen Harvey, DORA Lead & Dev Advocate at Google Cloud and Ganesh Datta, CTO at Cortex show you how to operationalize DORA metrics so they work together, transforming insight into sustained impact.