Blogs

Ever since Google released two documents detailing the security flaws in Intel chips, it has caused havoc in the tech community. Almost every CPU manufactured by Intel over the last 10 years is impacted by this architecture flaw. Microsoft has issued a patch to address the flaw last week and organizations are struggling to patch millions of CPUs. Users have reported performance issues with the fix by almost 30%. An...

CIOs and IT leaders are struggling with aligning IT strategy to business outcomes and how to bridge the gap between business users and IT. This challenge eventually leads to business users looking for solutions outside of internal IT to accomplish business goals, often times subscribing to SaaS and IaaS based solutions and effectively operating a shadow IT. For a CIO required to stay compliant with HIPAA, PCI and other...

According to Institute of Mergers, Acquisition and Alliances 2017 is forecasting 17,000 + M&As in the North American market alone which is up 15% from 2016. For IT organizations, the post M&A integration and execution work can be a nightmare....

Cloud Migration Bliss: 10 steps to assist in migrations. Get immediate and comprehensive visibility into your complex environments (advanced discovery); Understand the relationships (dependencies); Visually map and und...

Partners are leaders in seeing how technology tools can assist them in providing a better solution for clients. They are always interested in offerings that can assist them in lowering costs to clients, providing more visibility and speed, bein...

The reward of migrating services to the Cloud is in dramatic costs savings, elimination of legacy issues, future scalability and better sustainability. However, with migrations come the probability that there will be critical service interruptions, data loss, financial loss and reputational loss if a project fails or is even partially successful. AWS, Azure and most Cloud providers have done a great job on provisioning…the...

Cloud migrations have cratered seemingly well-planned projects. The issue is universal; visibility and understanding of the holistic environment, dependencies and the quantification of risk. Setting expectations for migrating services and applications today, without proper and comprehensive visibility, is a gamble at best. The result is a failed Cloud migration journey that has ramifications past just the time spent and...

A lot of clients, if not most, have started in earnest to move to the Cloud. Most started out moving the easiest apps first, kind of like a ‘test run’. And, some started moving internally to new datacenters instead of cloud to ‘get the hang of it’. What we have found is that the easiest apps and services, i.e. the low-hanging fruit, have been the first-adoption scenarios and basically the test...

Consistently over the past five years, industry analysts rank cloud migrations and datacenter upgrade projects in the top 10 initiatives for the year. Yet, we regularly talk to IT organizations that have only made marginal progress on cloud ini...

Service Management teams receive far too many incidents with inadequate information, delaying effective response. In fact, if we really think about it, IT in general spends more time investigating and running down information than actually resolving issues. As part of our coverage of Cherwell's Global Conference (CGC16) , let's take a moment to explore how this might be ameliorated. Let's think about a typical...

FireScope's integration with Cherwell Service Management CMDB continues to improve, thanks in large part to feedback from customers that rely on the combined solution to bring clarity to service topology. And with Cherwell's Global Conference in full swing, now's a good time to highlight a few of our most recent enhancements. First, we recently rolled out granular attribute mapping based on CI type, enabling...

(Please visit the site to view this video) DaaS is increasingly being seen by businesses as mission critical with factors like logon performance and desktop latency key metrics used to measure user experience and satisfaction. Far too ofte...

For what seems to be forever, discovery was one of those universal concepts that was pretty much standard across vendors. With few exceptions, it was nothing more than a ping sweep across a specified range or subnet to identify running devices (servers, network gear, etc.), followed by some flavor of NMAP to scan ports for running applications as well as host OS detection. For the sake of this discussion, we'll call...

If there’s any one gripe most users have with their monitoring toolset, it’s got to be a lack of effective event suppression. Virtually every organization I visit struggles with notification fatigue. The modern datacenter has a lot going ...

This article over on Medium is a definite must read. She makes an excellent case that sucky software is a bigger threat than hackers.

For the last quarter century, the general way in which we measure the availability of a networked asset has been the ping or connectivity test. If we get a response from a ping test, the asset is Up; no response it’s Down. Simple a...

Business alignment is perhaps the most overly abused buzzword by marketers in the IT monitoring industry. Virtually every vendor in the space claims that their solution can deliver tighter business alignment, but when you start to ask specific...

APM Digest recently posted an interesting article discussing the differences between agent-less and agent-based monitoring. I personally can’t count the number of times we’ve heard customers tell us that agents were out of the ques...

I’m a strong advocate of User Experience monitoring, and spend a lot of time on the subject when talking with FireScope customers. My biggest argument for using it is this; just because you’re monitoring your servers, applications, ...

According to a recent survey by the Ponemon Institute , average reported incidents lasted 86 minutes in 2013. While this is an improvement over results from the same study in 2010 (97 minutes), the impact to the business was actually greater ($690,200 versus $505,500 in 2010). This makes it quite a painful hour-and-a-half, and an area that a lot of organizations are going to be struggling to drive down. Unfortunately...

Understanding how all of your technical assets are interconnected and related has a multitude of uses beyond troubleshooting issues. However, if you really think about it, there’s more than one dimension to infrastructure topology, which ...

The Society for Information Management (SIM) has released some interesting survey data on what IT leaders and professionals think 2014 holds in store, as reported over on CIO.com . Here’s the quick facts:Looking ahead to 2014, 65% of surve...

The average network switch can expose upwards of 10,000 metrics describing availability, performance and security. I’ve seen filers with over 30,000. So, the question I’m posing is, for effective monitoring should I be collect...

Interesting stats from Emerson Network Power and the Ponemon Institute who surveyed over 450 IT operators, reported by Data Center Knowledge . First, the facts:The average cost of data center downtime across industries was approximately $7,900 p...

With Cloud, Virtualization and Software Defined Networks getting center stage, it’s easy to forget that hardware failure can still bring it all down. BackBlaze recently did an analysis of the failure rates of 25,000 disk drives and came ...