Ask the Experts

Ask the Experts

• How do I start on change and release management?

  We have nothing but an IT help desk email inbox to handle incidents. The rest is organized chaos and works well enough to keep the business running. But we'd like to implement ITSM best practices.  Continue Reading

• Do ops skills fall into an IT engineering job description?

  What are some ways to level up from an IT operations or administration role into an IT engineering one? Will my experience in IT operations translate into engineering tasks?  Continue Reading

• How do I maintain an Azure VM IP address during a reboot?

  I need a persistent cloud application deployment in which the Azure VMs' IP addresses remain the same after a restart or failure.  Continue Reading

• Are there IT jobs in cloud capacity management?

  If a company moves only 30% of workloads from its data center to the public cloud, that will reduce IT ops demand. Is there still a role for the ops engineer?  Continue Reading

• What CMDB benefits can we expect beyond a network management system?

  An NMS provides real-time feedback about operations and performance. A CMDB maintains relationships between components of an environment. Should we have both?  Continue Reading

• Could IT change control have prevented an IT deployment failure?

  An IT shop experiences performance issues in a long-running deployment that's been operational through many changes. The culprit is probably a build-up of IT configuration artifacts.  Continue Reading

• Should I allow SSH tunneling connections through the firewall?

  Allowing users to tunnel through a firewall to access any site creates a security risk. How big of a risk is it? It depends on how much you trust your users.  Continue Reading

• What options exist for IT infrastructure management services?

  What kinds of as-a-service IT management options are available? Are IT management services only coming from startups, or do established management software vendors have options?  Continue Reading

• What IT alerting strategy will cut down daily monitoring noise?

  I'm the new IT ops manager at my company, and I'm bombarded by IT alerts from our monitoring software. What do I need to look at first and what can I ignore? Who on my team needs to be on the alerts?  Continue Reading

• Can switching to all event-driven applications cut IT infrastructure?

  Event-driven computing means no IaaS provisioning and no data center to run. Can I migrate all enterprise apps to be event-driven?  Continue Reading

• How is runtime as a service different from PaaS or IaaS?

  What is runtime as a service and how does it differ from platform as a service and infrastructure as a service?  Continue Reading

• What mistakes throw off VM load balancing?

  I track VM performance on my IT infrastructure, and want to optimize the distribution of virtual workloads.  Continue Reading

• How do I size capacity for VMware oversubscription?

  What best practices and tools can I use to allocate the right resources in an oversubscribed virtualization deployment?  Continue Reading

• How can we move containerized apps among clouds?

  Our business wants to stay cloud-agnostic, and we think containers are our best option. How complicated is it to move applications from one cloud platform to another?  Continue Reading

• How can active-active clustering use load balancers?

  Active-active clustering and cloud services enable IT workload resilience or redundancy in the enterprise. How does load balancing influence these setups?  Continue Reading