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In July 2016, the world of gaming was taken over by a new phenomenon – Pokémon Go. With popularity comes scale, and with scale comes an overload of requests to the gaming servers. Here is my list of probable solutions Pokémon Go could employ to improve the experience for their users and avid fans ...
A recent study conducted by Bizagi revealed that 79 percent of businesses with high levels of digital change cite changing customer expectations as the key driver for transformation. But that transformation is no easy task. Only 25 percent of businesses globally are highly agile, revealing that there is room for improvement across regions when it comes to incorporating fresh strategies and processes ...
When business service teams run into technical issues and alert storms, they want and need them resolved immediately, so these problems don't negatively impact their workload, deliverables, or client service. They call on their IT department for help, and their request then goes into the queue as an alert first, then multiple tickets later. Sounds simple, but in reality this has become a complex problem that's causing much confusion for downstream managers ...
System Administrators (SysAdmins) are every organization’s unsung heroes. Whether it’s diagnosing performance bottlenecks or preventing data loss, application downtime, service outages and more, SysAdmins keep data centers running and work tirelessly behind the scenes to keep all the technology modern businesses have come to rely so heavily upon running smoothly. SolarWinds has developed these e-cards as a fun way to say “thank you” ...
IT has access to an amazing amount of data. Often we collect hundreds of data points on one server such as individual processor load, thread state, disk throughput both in and out etc. We then store this in a bin and use this to create a metric called something similar to server performance ...
Today's IT managers and engineers have an incredible arsenal of powerful tactical tools; APM, NPM, BSM, EUEM and the list goes on. The strength of these tools, their narrow, bottom-up focus, is also the cause of a real problem for businesses. These narrow tools miss issues that stem from the hand-off from one node or application to the next. The monitoring tools can't see the data falling into the gaps ...
One of the most common problems network monitoring tools are employed to solve are problems with bandwidth. Availability is critical for IT departments of all sizes, and slow bandwidth creates productivity problems and even outages that have a real effect on businesses. Identifying the problems behind bandwidth drains can be difficult, so to help, I’ve put together a list of the five most common causes of sudden traffic spikes ...
In 2014 Gartner predicted that "75 percent of IT organizations will be bi-modal in some way by 2017." We are in the midst of this two-speed IT approach that organizations are adopting at an increasing rate to stay relevant for their customers. Speed 1 is the traditional IT that is being managed by the IT Operations persona and Speed 2 is the agile IT where within the organization especially the Developer persona and the Line of Business Persona are involved to get the most out of the digital innovations that flood our daily lives. One thing that these personas have in common is that they have a need for monitoring. In this blog I will focus on the needs of the various personas ...
While shoppers enjoy the bargains on Prime Day – a 24-hour sale on Amazon – few may realize that the success of such massive events hinges on network and application performance ...
I am constantly hearing the common theme that organizations want to make their IT-dependent employees and customers top priority in order to better support business growth. However, what I then find contradictory is while the desire is there, it's a significant challenge for organizations to actually achieve this. Here are four common barriers to business transformation initiatives – and suggested steps enterprises can take to overcome them ...
You already see the potential of adopting an Internet of Things model into your enterprise, but are you doing it in the best way? The following are four questions you and your team should be answering to determine how to find the right opportunity in the IoT space for your business ...
The correct response within the expected time – those are the two main benefits your data center provides. If you don't provide those benefits your business loses customers. It will filter down to you through sales, then marketing, then the CIO then – what are you going to do now?
By participating in identifying and implementing tools that fill employees needs while providing quality experiences, IT departments can support employee productivity rather than hinder it. At the same time, they’ll be able to more easily and securely govern the plethora of consumer applications inundating the enterprise. Here are examples of software characteristics and user experience best practices that can provide workers with efficient workflows yet also meet the functionality requirements of IT administrators ...
APM technologies have evolved quickly over the past few years and, will no doubt, continue to accelerate during the coming years. One key area which APM vendors have to recognize is a current weakness that must be quickly addressed is that the compelling business driver is not just ensuring the health, availability, and performance of "applications" but the business services which they support ...
Delivering perfect production performance is always hard and ever changing. The fundamentals are very structured and logical, however, with so many end points in a dynamic, virtualized, distributed application topology. The only viable approach today is to understand the end user experience as measured by response time ...
Application performance levels too often fail to meet the needs of the business. This creates what I call a "performance gap" – a widening gulf between the needs of business and what IT is able to provide (or not) to meet those needs. The business impacts include more unhappy customers, contract delays, missed deadlines and lost revenue. So in Part 2 of this series, let's examine the four key elements any organization can address today to bridge this gap ...
The technology landscape is littered with confusing terminology. The term "monitoring," for example, can mean any number of things, and while more specified terms like application performance monitoring, network performance monitoring, or infrastructure monitoring are supposed to narrow it down, there is often overlap and confusion into what is supposed to go where. Here are several key areas to focus on when evaluating your next IT purchase ...
The demand for real-time collaboration has introduced new performance requirements for enterprise networks to deliver a great user experience. A recent study conducted by BT and InfoVista, Meeting the Network Demands of Changing Generations, found that 90 percent of today’s workforce is unsatisfied with the application performance on their employer’s network overall ...
Network communications are a top priority for DevOps teams working in support of modern globally-distributed systems and microservices. But basic network interface statistics like received and sent traffic aren't as useful as they once were because multiple microservices may share the same network interface. For meaningful analysis, you need to dig deeper and correlate network-traffic metrics with individual processes. This is however just the beginning ...
If your company has experience in developing applications or performance management solutions, then you might want to consider joining an APM vendor's ecosystem to grow revenue. Here is how it should work: you develop market solutions incorporating your industry and technology experience, the vendor sells the solution globally through multiple channels, and you collect your check each month. The key is developing solutions for a market, not just one customer ...
