We asked in a recent poll which popular TV show your IT team resembles the most. Big Brother came out on top, with almost 40% of respondents saying that their incident resolution process most resembled this show. Would you compare your incident management process to an episode of Big Brother? If so, it's likely that your IT environment is highly monitored, but incidents still seem to slip through the cracks.

We recently ran a quick poll where we asked the audience, “When an IT incident occurs at your company, what TV show does it most resemble?” Twenty-three percent of respondents told us that CSI: Crime Scene Investigation resembled them the most. We needed to dig into that a little deeper. Let’s walk through the typical steps of figuring out the root cause, in CSI fashion: Photographs are critical in the world of CSI.

There are some things in life that seem too good to be true. So good, in fact, that they border on the edge of mythology. We see this often in the case of Cross-Domain Topology. Cross-Domain Topology ties together all the pieces of a hybrid, dynamic IT environment, so you can instantly see how changes impact your environment. It’s something that a lot of people didn’t even think was a possibility. While unicorns are myths, Cross-Domain Topology is very real. Here’s how it works.

In its latest report, research firm Gartner tackles the trending subject of Observability. According to Gartner, "Observability is the evolution of monitoring into a process that offers insight into digital business applications, speeds innovation and enhances customer experience. I&O leaders should use observability to extend current monitoring capabilities, processes, and culture to deliver these benefits." This blog post gives you a sneak-peek of this new analyst report about observability.

First of all: apologies...because although the title suggests otherwise, this blog is not about "Observability VS. Monitoring." It's a great misconception that observability is this hot new technology that's here to replace your monitoring tools.

In the evolving world of IT monitoring, I see that many organizations want to move to predictive monitoring. They usually allocate a significant budget for this type of effort that ultimately fails to yield the desired return on investment. Often, organizations are already collecting and processing large amounts of IT telemetry streams and using multiple solutions to monitor their systems. So, predictive monitoring seems like the logical next step.

My team was not happy with me. I had just convened a meeting of my direct reports — and the managers that reported to them — to deliver the news personally. “No more new tools,” I told them. “We have everything we need to do our job. Our environment just doesn’t change that fast. So stop bringing me requests for new tools. The answer is no.” It was unquestionably the right call at the time, but today, it would be laughable.

If you’re like us, you’ve been binge-watching a lot of shows over the past few months. That got us thinking—do you ever consider your company's problem resolution process to feel like an episode of one of your favorite shows? We ran a short poll to see how IT teams would relate their incident resolution processes to popular TV shows. Here are the results. We ran a short poll to see how IT teams would relate their incident resolution processes to popular TV shows.

That’s the question ops personnel have been asking for decades whenever something goes wrong in the production IT environment. Everything was working before, so the reasoning goes, and now it’s not. We have an incident. And to figure out what caused the incident – and hence, to have any idea how to fix it – we must know what changed. There’s just one problem with this approach. What if everything is subject to change, all the time?

There are tons of query languages. Yet, another query language was invented: the StackState Query Language, or STQL for short. Perhaps this raises some questions. Such as: Why did we not choose to implement SQL? Did we reinvent the wheel? How did we balance the complexity of the language against the time to implement the language? What's the learning curve of this new language? Let me share with you our novel approach.