Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In the first article in this series, you learned how to set up your developer environment, the first step toward creating your very own Mattermost plugins. Take my word for it: Your first attempts at writing Mattermost plugins can be quite confusing. Where do you start? What do you have to do to get your first plugin up and running? At the end of this series, you’ll be well on your way to writing your own plugin.

In today’s technology-driven world, network automation tools have evolved from convenience to necessity in practically every IT field. Traditionally, IT managers would issue manual command lines to manage networks, but given the size of today’s business networks, manual workflows dealing with repetitive network tasks have become time-consuming and counterproductive, often at risk of incurring errors from manual implementation.

There’s a big difference between the MySQL database powering your internet of things (IoT) lightbulb and the one powering your website. There’s a chasm between the SQL Server Express database in your lightly used application’s VM and the monster multi-region SQL cluster you have running on Microsoft Azure. This kind of database diversity is everywhere today. But what are the differences between these databases, and how can administrators justify database spend?