Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The Compounding Platform Tax

Private cloud and on-premises infrastructure are different. I know this. I used the terms interchangeably anyway because I was trying to compress a pattern into one sentence. That was sloppy, but the underlying pattern still matters. Banks run Kubernetes differently from most other organizations. Not because every bank makes the same choices, but because similar constraints can produce a similar pattern.

Your Observability Stack Found the Fire. Congratulations.

The dashboards are red, the alerts are firing, and Slack has officially become a war room. Someone has asked, “Anyone else seeing this?” and 14 people have immediately responded with screenshots. Welcome to another day in distributed systems. The recent GitHub outage is a great reminder of how complicated modern applications have become. Services talk to services, infrastructure scales up and down, retries multiply traffic, and dependencies behave in ways nobody expected.

Top tips: How to become more tech-savvy without being a tech expert

Top Tips is a weekly column where we explore practical ways to navigate the technology shaping our everyday lives. This week, we're tackling a common feeling: the fear of not being “tech-savvy” enough, and sharing simple habits to help you become more confident, curious, and comfortable with the technology you use every day. Ever felt like you’re the only person in the room who doesn’t understand what everyone is talking about? That little fear of looking clueless?

Add metadata to multiple monitors at once

We’ve made monitor metadata easier to manage at scale. You can now use Bulk Actions to add metadata to multiple monitors at once. Select the monitors you want to update, choose Metadata from the Bulk Actions menu, and add the key/value pairs you want to apply. For example, you can quickly add the same team, owner, project, environment, or other custom information across a group of monitors – without editing each one individually.

Introducing the Live Outage Map

We’ve added a new Live Outage Map to StatusGator, giving you a visual way to see where outages are happening across the services you rely on. Instead of checking services individually, you can see outage activity from the last 24 hours in one place – including both detected incidents and live outage reports from users.
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Home Sweet Hybrid - There's more to your transition than core ERP

Most large enterprises elect a hybrid approach to SAP operations, but this is a more recent trend. And, as SAP operations professionals, we are still learning about the impacts of this choice and approach, even though it's often the most sensible and pragmatic. Years ago, everything ran on-premises. But today it's a mixed architecture of SAP running on-premises, landscapes leveraging hyperscaler platforms, and for customers migrating to Cloud ERP, an even more complicated mix including cloud services like BTP in addition to decades of legacy.
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Microsoft 365 Monitoring for MSPs: Why the Admin Center Isn't Enough

Managed Service Providers are responsible for an increasing proportion of their customers' cloud infrastructure. For many MSPs, Microsoft 365 has become one of the most important parts of that responsibility. Email, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Entra ID, Intune and Microsoft 365 licensing can all sit within the same customer environment. Add security configuration, Microsoft Secure Score and user lifecycle management, and there is a considerable amount for an MSP to monitor.

SAP Basis Automation: A Practitioner's Guide to 5 Scenarios and ROI

Automating SAP Basis tasks means trading manual, repetitive administration work for scheduled or event-driven workflows. These workflows typically include automated health checks, job monitoring and recovery, system refresh post-processing, and patch validation. This guide covers five things worth automating: four recurring operational tasks that return hours back to your team, plus a fifth layer, AI-driven diagnosis, that sits on top of all four and catches what routine automation can’t.

Don't Sleep on Perplexity

Perplexity was a big name a few years ago. But, we haven’t heard much out of them lately. There are plenty of posts on social media criticizing Perplexity to that effect. One thing that the posts miss is that Perplexity is still the king of AI search. Google is giving it a run for its money with the AI previews on Google search, but Perplexity still wins out in several measurable ways.

Task containers turn idle jobs into on-demand compute

Somewhere in most production setups there is a container that stays awake all week to do one job on Friday. Maybe it re-indexes a database. Maybe it runs a batch report, or a data migration that only matters at month end. Either way, the resources are billed for seven days. Task containers close that gap. They are ephemeral, API-triggered containers that spin up inside an Upsun Cloud environment, run exactly one command, and remove themselves when that command exits. Nothing sits idle between runs.