Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Network admins want all devices with the same role to behave the same way. But in real environments, that consistency rarely lasts. Imagine two core switches in the same data center. They serve the same function and run the same OS version. One handles traffic without issue, while the other drops packets during peak hours. Logs show nothing obvious. Routing looks correct. The team spends hours checking links, hardware, and traffic paths.

In the first experiment, I wanted a baseline: if an AI coding agent gets the same production signal a human would get, can it fix bugs in a codebase it has never seen? Yes, but only when I gave it better context. With only an alert, the agent passed 51% of the runtime tests. When I added captured traffic, the actual request and response for the failing call, it climbed to 77%. This post is the second pass.

Microsoft SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) remains a widely used enterprise monitoring platform due to its deep integration with Windows, hybrid-cloud support, and extensible management packs. However, the value of SCOM is fully realized only when its alerts seamlessly flow into ITSM or ticketing systems. This ensures incidents are created, routed, and resolved efficiently.

June was about finishing touches. The fun part. Node.js support, which we previewed in May, is live. Anomaly detection graduated with a rebuilt algorithm, per-monitor controls, and access from the API, CLI, and MCP server. We also kept pulling on the same thread from recent months: Scout data should be reachable from wherever you actually work. The MCP server now covers historical insights, anomaly events, and 30-day metrics. Discord is a notification channel. The CLI has scout anomalies.

An IT asset audit is one of those processes most IT teams know they should run regularly and rarely do well. Records drift from reality, licenses go unchecked, and the first sign something is wrong usually arrives as an auditor's request or an unexpected vendor notice. This guide walks through how to perform an IT asset audit step by step, and how to structure the process so it never requires a last-minute scramble.