Feature Articles

Closing DevOps Gaps with New Analytics-Based Tools
May 21, 2013
Sasha Gilenson

DevOps emerged as a philosophy for bridging the gap between operations and development silos, where each focused on different priorities, using different processes and tools. This article will focus on some key challenges existing in the DevOps approach — challenges that leave operations to wade through overwhelming amounts of operational data — and how new analytics-based tools stand to provide insight into meaningful information, ultimately closing this gap, and putting development and operations into better synch ...

Innovator, Firefighter, or Ghost? Cisco Survey Explores IT's Impact on Business
May 14, 2013

While the majority of IT professionals are confident in their ability to respond to the needs of the business, almost a third still equated the visibility of their IT department into their company's business initiatives to a foggy day in London, according to the 2013 Cisco Global IT Impact Survey ...

CMDB: The Beating Heart of IT Management
May 09, 2013
Suvish Viswanathan

The more effectively we can integrate management tools at every level and the more effectively we can manage the delivery of IT as a service to our constituents, the more value we add to the enterprise and its mission. At the same time, the further we enlarge those circles to encompass and integrate infrastructures that were previously disconnected, the greater the number of elements we need to incorporate, monitor and manage. We need something that ties all these disparate pieces together. That’s where the configuration management database (CMDB) fits in ...

5 Keys for Effective Mobile Performance Testing
May 06, 2013
Eran Kinsbruner

While mobile is quickly becoming the de-facto market platform for many of the business-critical applications deployed by banks, insurance companies and other enterprise organizations, the need to ensure an optimal end user experience mandates a robust mobile performance testing environment. Building an efficient mobile performance test strategy should consist of the following five pillars ...

Don't Let Perishable Apps Go Bad
April 24, 2013
Dave Berg

What if your mission-critical app is not designed to last? What if your app is perishable with a shelf life of only a few hours or days? With these apps, traditional monitoring and remediation become irrelevant. The app will expire before it can be fixed. But, that doesn't mean that perishable apps are fated to be poor performing and unsatisfying. Proper planning, testing, and additional resources can keep your perishable apps from going bad ...

Q&A: EMA Talks About ITIL and Cloud
April 22, 2013

EMA VP Dennis Drogseth and EMA Director Torsten Volk discuss recent EMA research such as The Service Desk in the Age of Cloud and Agile and Demystifying Cloud as well as prior EMA research on cloud adoptions as they impact strategic management requirements ...

15 Top Factors that Impact Application Performance
April 17, 2013

What is it that drives the need for Application Performance Management? What are the main factors that can negatively impact application performance? What should you be looking out for? That is what this new APMdigest list reveals ...

Why You Need to Integrate IT Operations and IT Service Management
April 15, 2013
Suvish Viswanathan

When you think about it, we’re not just focusing on application and network performance solely for the sake of performance. In today’s business environment, we’re focusing on performance because IT has become a service — and ultimately, we are the ones in charge of the delivery of that service. Given that reality, does it make any sense to treat IT operations management and IT service management as distinct and separate activities? I submit that it does not ...

How Good Are You At Blamestorming?
April 10, 2013
Vincent Geffray

Blamestorming is a well-known game IT organizations spend hours playing every week. The goal of the game is to figure out the origin of an IT service degradation issue and collectively identify the one person — or the team — to blame ...

Software Defined Networking: A New Approach to Delivering Business Agility
April 04, 2013

Software defined networking (SDN) is creating a lot of excitement in data centers, but current technology is still relatively immature. Joe Skorupa, VP and distinguished analyst at Gartner, explains that SDN is not only limited to data center and service provider networks ...