The terminology used in the world of IT Service Management (ITSM) can be somewhat confusing. However, correctly understanding the scope and depth of each of its practices can be crucial for a company’s future. Today, we will explore one of those ongoing debates: CMDB vs. Asset Management. These two concepts have many similarities. In fact, they sometimes overlap. But they are not exactly the same thing. So, how do they differ? Primarily, in their scope.

The SolarWinds State of ITSM Report has arrived. To uncover key trends, challenges, and practices in today's IT Service Management (ITSM) landscape, we’ve analyzed over 2,000 ITSM systems and more than 60,000 aggregated, anonymized data points spanning 13 months from July 1, 2023, to July 31, 2024. Here are a few things we found interesting.

If you have ever faced performance issues in an application, whether it's sluggish load times, long processing delays, or poor scalability you have probably been told that optimizing the code or database is the solution. But what does that really mean in practice? A lot of the time, it boils down to one of two causes: either a poorly optimized algorithm (often with quadratic or exponential time complexity) or an inefficient database query.

Kubernetes offers the ability to scale infrastructure to accommodate fluctuating demand, enabling organizations to maintain availability and high performance during surges in traffic and reduce costs during lulls. But scaling comes with tradeoffs and must be done carefully to ensure teams are not over-provisioning their workloads or clusters. For example, organizations often struggle with overprovisioning in Kubernetes and wind up paying for resources that go unused.

While overprovisioning Kubernetes workloads can provide stability during the launch of new products, it’s often only sustainable because large companies have substantial budgets and favorable deals with cloud providers. As highlighted in Datadog’s State of Cloud Costs report, cloud spending continues to grow, but a significant portion of that cost is often due to inefficiencies like overprovisioning.

Custom resources are critical components in Kubernetes production environments. They enable users to tailor Kubernetes resources to their specific applications or infrastructure needs, automate processes through operators, simplify the management of complex applications, and integrate with non-native applications such as Kafka and Elasticsearch.