Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Both DevOps and ITIL are two popular frameworks in the IT space and get a lot of attention. However, while both are frameworks, DevOps is more of a collaboration method and shift in thinking vs. ITIL, which is a set of detailed guidelines for IT service management. You can be fairly flexible when it comes to your DevOps implementation in your organization, ITIL is more rigid, with very prescriptive guidance necessary for it to earn the label of ITIL.

This past October, we had the pleasure of meeting with 11 IT leaders from diverse industries—including healthcare, financial services, education, telecom, logistics, and technology— as part of our inaugural SolarWinds Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting. The CAB is an exciting initiative for both myself, and our GVP of Customer Success, Anselm Peng.

Application engineers play a crucial role in bridging customer needs and the efforts of application development teams. Applications are becoming more complex—businesses are seeking to deliver more services while the software engineering components underlying those them are expanding and interacting in new ways. This combination of factors is driving the need for application engineers who can understand both the business and the technical aspects of applications.

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) describes a framework for delivering IT services according to best practices, including best practices for what’s known as knowledge management. Knowledge management, which includes being able to gather, store, and share IT knowledge, is critical for IT service management (ITSM).

As organizations increasingly adopt more devices, applications, and other technologies, IT teams addressing problems before they arise is a vital part of avoiding downtime, maintaining productivity, and ultimately growing revenue. While a reactive approach has traditionally been good enough, the most successful organizations are increasingly taking proactive measures to ensure employees always have access to what they need with little or no downtime.

When we look at the calls our help desk receives, we see many of the same issues repeatedly. Some of the most common calls help desk agents receive involve issues like password resets, new hardware requests, and generating standard reports. And when we examine our IT environments as a whole over the last decade or so, there has been a huge emphasis on automation. Why? We have learned that automation reduces risk, streamlines workflows, and makes everyone more productive.

Over half of the world’s population are active on social media, with a typical user spending two hours and 25 minutes each day, equating to roughly one full waking day of their life each week. According to a report published by researchers at the University of California, San Diego—on average, we consume about 34 gigabytes of data and information each day.

Digital services are increasingly built as a collection of components working in concert to deliver significant business functions. Understanding how these components of a system are working is crucial to reliably delivering a service. With many systems interacting, it can be difficult, if not impossible, to understand the state of your services and their dependencies without detailed data about how they function.

An API, application programming interface, is a collection of tools, protocols, and subroutines that can be used when building software programs or applications. APIs makes software development easier by providing reusable components and a set of clearly defined communication protocols. Recently APIs have come to mean web services, but there are also APIs for software and hardware libraries, operating systems and databases.