Xebia Articles

With increasing customer demands, system reliability becomes more critical by the second. You can’t prevent all incidents, but you can learn from them—making your systems more resilient, reliable and capable of providing the services your customers need.

Should we get rid of IT architects, or do we need them more than ever?-There are a lot of connotations when it comes to traditional IT architecture: 

After embracing Agile processes and continuous delivery for application development, many IT departments are now adopting DevOps as a service delivery approach. DevOps is imperative for creating and operating a productive information platform that’s essential for digital business. As the name suggests, IT operations are part of these initiatives.

Predicting incidents is the holy grail for modern IT organizations. It is no wonder that we see an increase in the usage of AI for prediction. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. But to what standard should we hold these predictions? When is a prediction important enough to wake you in the middle of the night? What is the level and type of information that ought to accompany a prediction? This blog introduces a new concept that is meant to raise the bar.

Big projects take forever, never get done, and lose relevancy for before anyone uses them. Building things nobody uses is a waste of time, and money, but we spend fortunes doing it, over and over again. There is a better way.

It's Thursday, 09:00AM. You arrive at work and see a huddle of people in the meeting room near your desk. Monitors are spread out across the room and engineers from the web team, Java team, .NET team and database team are staring intently at their screens. You forego your morning coffee for now and enter the room to see if you can help.

Root-causing and troubleshooting issues across the IT environment is a hard task as today’s infrastructure and applications span on-premise and cloud environments, and are more elastic, dynamic and distributed in nature. 

Think about the following questions before reading this article: (1) did you ever encounter an outage in a business chain where someone depending on the chain could not perform their job for hours? (2) Is there anyone who has insight in all dependencies between systems? (3) Is the status of each system available to everyone? (4) Do departments report a scheduled release to the depending departments? 

1. Don’t Know The Possible Impact of Deployments

Fast, short release cycles make it hard to keep track of your application and infrastructure landscape. A small change deep down in the infrastructure may seem innocuous, but can have a large impact over time. Today’s monitoring solutions should be able to provide insight which systems could be impacted before you deploy new software.

Ever heard of the English saying: "when it rains, it pours", meaning whenever something bad happens, it's usually not alone? It's an old saying, appearing in books written in the 17th century, but it applies equally today in the case of IT monitoring.