If you have worked in the automation sector for some time, it is likely you have come across or at least heard of PTC Kepware. They provide one of the largest connectivity suites for automation devices such as PLC’s easing the bridge between the OT (Operation Technology) and IT (Information Technology) world. The best part? You can store, transform and visualize this data using InfluxDB. This blog post will take you through the different ways of connecting your Kepware instance to InfluxDB.

For time series workloads the ability of serverless functions to scale up and down is a major advantage, especially for something like IoT devices that may have intermittent connectivity and might suddenly send data in bursts. In this type of situation, it doesn’t make sense to be paying for a server to be running 24/7 when you can use a serverless function and only pay for the compute you use.

In any enterprise, IT or otherwise, infrastructure monitoring and management are extremely crucial. A drop in performance or a failure of a machine can lead to significant delays. For that reason, there’s a constant need for eyes on the overall infrastructure to ensure smooth operations. One of the best ways to gauge the overall health of infrastructure is by monitoring key performance indicators (KPI).

Development is no longer a linear journey from point A to point B. As more projects shift into a state of organic growth, user feedback and constant experimentation are increasingly becoming the norm, if not the standard for engineering. “In order to support this rapid experimentation, we’re beginning to embrace new working methods and practices,” said Vinodh Ravi, Executive Director of Platform Engineering at JPMorgan Chase.

Since being launched in 2014, the AWS Lambda service has spread fast amongst developers and cloud architects, for it is easy to use, and there is a significant cost benefit (pay-per-use basis). AWS Lambda is an Amazon Web Services serverless deployment platform that you can use in the AWS cloud environment with basically no overhead. It will save you much time and resources using Lambda for performing code tasks for websites, applications, and services running on AWS.

I recently talked with James Kao, Head of Engineering for APM at Broadcom. James leads the global development team to deliver the AIOps and application monitoring solutions that power the world's most successful businesses. He has had a diverse background in application development and monitoring across development, product management, and solution engineering roles over the last 20 years at both large enterprises and startups such as Oracle, ClearApp, and The Middleware Company.

It’s easy to see why developers and IT engineers should care about AIOps, which automates tasks (like incident remediation) that they would otherwise have to perform manually. But what does the business get out of AIOps? How do AIOps-powered tools help improve business outcomes? Those questions are critical to answer for any organization considering an investment in AIOps solutions.