IT automation uses software and technology to handle repetitive IT tasks automatically, reducing the need for manual work and accelerating processes like infrastructure management and application deployment. This transformation is essential for IT teams needing to scale efficiently, as seen in the case of Sogeti, a Managed Service Provider (MSP) that provides tech and engineering resources worldwide.

Sogeti had a crucial IT challenge to solve. The MSP operates in more than 100 locations globally and uses six different monitoring tools to monitor its customers’ environments. It was a classic example of tool sprawl and needing to scale where multiple teams of engineers relied on too many disparate tools to manage their customers’ environments. It soon became too arduous for the service provider to collect, integrate, and analyze the data from those tools. 

Sogeti had teams of technicians managing different technologies, and they all existed in silos. But what if there was a way to combine those resources? 

IT automation provided a solution. 

After working with LogicMonitor, Sogeti replaced the bulk of its repeatable internal processes with automated systems and sequences. The result? Now, they could continue to scale their business with a view of those processes from a single pane of glass.

Conundrum cracked. 

That’s just one example of how IT automation tools completely revolutionizes how an IT services company like an MSP or DevOps vendor can better execute its day-to-day responsibilities. 

By automating repeatable, manual processes, IT enterprises streamline even the most complicated workflows, tasks, and batch processes. No human intervention is required. All it takes is the right tech to do it so IT teams can focus on more strategic, high-priority efforts. 

But what exactly is IT automation? How does it work? What are the different types? Why should IT companies even care?

IT automation, explained

IT automation is the creation of repeated software processes to reduce or eliminate manual or human-initiated IT tasks. It allows IT companies with MSPs, DevOps teams, and ITOps teams to automate jobs, save time, and free up resources.

IT automation takes many forms but almost always involves software that triggers a repeated sequence of events to solve common business problems—for example, automating a file transfer. It moves from one system to another without human intervention or autogenerates network performance reports. 

Almost all medium and large-sized IT-focused organizations use some automation to facilitate system and software processes, and smaller companies benefit from this tech, too. The most successful ones invest heavily in the latest tools and tech to automate an incredible range of tasks and processes to scale their business. 

The production, agricultural, and manufacturing sectors were the first industries to adopt IT automation. However, this technology has since extended to niches such as healthcare, finance, retail, marketing, services, and more. Now, IT-orientated companies like MSPs and enterprise vendors can incorporate automation into their workflows and grow their businesses exponentially. 

How does IT automation work?

The software does all the hard work. Clever programs automate tasks that humans lack the time or resources to complete themselves. 

Developers code these programs to execute a sequence of instructions that trigger specific events from specific operating systems at specific times. For example, programming software so customer data from a customer relationship management system (CRM) generates a report every morning at 9 a.m. Users of those programs can then customize instructions based on their business requirements. 

With so many benefits of IT automation, it’s no wonder that two-thirds of CFOs plan to accelerate the automation of repetitive tasks within their companies. 

Why do businesses use IT automation?

IT-focused businesses use automation for various reasons:

• It makes life easier for tech teams. For example, engineers and technicians at MSP companies no longer have to execute tasks like network performance analysis, data security management, or reporting manually. The software takes care of everything for them so they can better focus their efforts on other tasks.
• It makes life easier for non-tech teams. Employees across all departments within an IT-focused organization benefit from automation because they can carry out responsibilities on software and systems with less manual work. For example, administrative employees in a DevOps consulting firm can generate payroll reports without manually entering information into a computer by hand. 
• It helps CIOs and executives scale their businesses because other employees, such as engineers and MSP professionals, can complete jobs with minimum effort. Automation frees up tech resources and removes as much manual IT work as possible, allowing IT-centered organizations to improve their margins and grow. 
• It helps CIOs and executives fulfill client-orientated objectives by improving service delivery. Automation can also advance productivity across an organization, which results in better service level agreement (SLA) outcomes. Again, the right automation software reduces as much manual work for tech teams so businesses can grow and carry out responsibilities more efficiently. 
• It allows MSPs and other IT companies, especially smaller ones, to survive in ever-competitive environments. By automating IT processes, these enterprises can stay competitive with more tech resources and reduced manual labor.
• It allows for improved profitability in IT companies. For example, MSPs can onboard more clients without hiring new engineers. That’s because automated systems delegate tasks and resources seamlessly.
• It reduces costs for IT companies by saving time and improving operational efficiencies. For example, by freeing up human resources, enterprises can focus on generating more sales and revenue. As a result, CIOs and executives have more money to spend on labor and can add highly skilled IT professionals to their tech teams. 

Key benefits of IT automation

IT automation delivers many advantages that extend beyond simple task delegation. Let’s look at a few benefits your organization will see.

Enhanced organizational efficiency

With the complexity of modern IT infrastructure, modern environments may handle thousands of requests daily—everything from password resets to system failures. Automation can help reduce the time it takes to handle many of those requests. For example, look at an IT telecommunications company with a lot of infrastructure. They can automate their network configuration process, cutting the deployment time from a few weeks to less than a day.

Reduce errors

Human error in IT environments can be costly. Errors can lead to unexpected system downtime, security breaches, and data entry errors—all of which you can avoid by standardizing consistency and standards through automation. Automation helps your team eliminate routine data entry and other tasks and greatly reduces the chance of human error. For example, your team may decide to create backup scripts for more complicated setups to ensure you always have reliable backups.

Faster service delivery

Automation helps speed up responses to common IT requests. If your IT team is stuck needing to perform every task manually, it increases incident response time and the length of time your customer waits on the other end of the line for a fix. Automation speeds up common tasks—setting up VPN access, account resets, report creation, and security scans—allowing your team to focus on finding the root cause of problems, deploying resources, and bringing systems back online.

Streamlined resource allocation

Your organization’s IT needs may fluctuate depending on how many users you have and their activities. A strict guide for resource usage may result in some users being unable to work efficiently because of slow systems. Automation can help by automating resource allocation. For cloud services, you can scale your servers based on demand, and for network traffic, you can dynamically adjust traffic routes based on usage.

Enhanced compliance and security

Automated systems can help your team maintain detailed audit trails and enforce consistent security policies. They can also help with continuous monitoring, allowing your team to get alerts immediately when your solution detects suspicious activity. Additionally, your IT systems can automatically generate compliance reports, such as SOC 2, for review, helping your team find potential problems and comply with audit requests.

Different IT automation types

IT companies benefit from various types of IT automation.

Artificial intelligence

A branch of computer science concerned with developing machines that automate repeatable processes across industries. In an IT-specific context, artificial intelligence (AI) automates repetitive jobs for engineers and IT staff, reduces the human error associated with manual labor, and allows companies to carry out tasks 24 hours a day.

Machine learning

Machine learning (ML) is a type of AI that uses algorithms and statistics to find real-time trends in data. This intelligence proves valuable for MSPs, DevOps, and ITOps companies. Employees can stay agile and discover context-specific patterns over a wide range of IT environments while significantly reducing the need for case-by-case investigations.

Robot process automation

Robot Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that instructs ‘robots’ (machines) to emulate various human actions. Although less common in IT environments than in AI and ML, RPA still provides value for MSPs and other professionals. For example, enterprises can use RPA to manage servers, data centers, and other physical infrastructure.

Infrastructure automation

IT infrastructure automation involves using tools and scripts to manage computing resource provisioning with manual intervention. This includes tasks like server provisioning, bandwidth management, and storage allocation. This allows for dynamic resource usage, with the most resources going to the users and applications with the most need.

How can businesses use IT automation?

A proper automation strategy is critical for IT companies. CIOs and executives should decide how to achieve automation within their organizations and then choose the right tools and technologies that facilitate these objectives.

Doing so will benefit your business in many ways.

• Improve your company’s operation by removing redundant tasks and freeing up time to work on more mission-critical jobs
• Enhance customer satisfaction by more quickly responding and resolving problems
• Improve employee satisfaction by making sure business systems stay online, helping meet their expectations and improving their ability to do their jobs

Here are some examples of how IT companies use automation:

Templating/blueprints

Companies can automate templates and blueprints, promoting the successful rollout of services such as network security and data center administration. 

Workflow/technology integration

Automation allows companies to integrate technology with workflows. As a result, CIOs and executives complete day-to-day tasks more effectively with the latest hardware and software. For example, automating server management to improve service level management workflows proves useful if clients expect a particular amount of uptime from an MSP. 

AI/ML integration

AI and ML might be hard for some companies to grasp at first. However, teams can learn these technologies over time and eventually combine them for even more effective automation within their organizations. 

Auto-discovery 

Automated applications like the LogicMonitor Collector, which runs on Linux or Windows servers within an organization’s infrastructure, use monitoring protocols to track processes without manual configuration. Users discover network changes and network asset changes automatically.

Auto-scaling

IT companies can monitor components like device clusters or a VM in a public cloud and scale resources up or down as necessary. 

Automated remediation/problem resolution 

Hardware and software can provide companies like MSPs with all kinds of problems (downtime, system errors, security vulnerabilities, alert storms, etc.). Automation, however, identifies and resolves infrastructure and system issues with little or no human effort. 

Performance monitoring and reporting

Automation can automatically generate regular performance reports, SLA reports, compliance reports, and capacity planning forecasts. It can also generate automated alerting systems in case of problems and report trends to help your business with capacity planning.

Best practices for automation success

Successfully automating IT in business requires careful planning and thoughtful execution. Follow these best practices to avoid the common mistakes and maximize efficiency:

• Align automation and business goals: Don’t just start automating everything possible without a plan. Begin by identifying what you want to achieve with automation. Look for areas to reduce operational costs, improve service, and enhance customer satisfaction, and start with the areas that have the most impact and help you reach your goals. Consider asking stakeholders and employees about their biggest friction points and the ability to automate them.
• Start small: Investing in IT automation is an ongoing task, and you may not do things right the first time. Start small with quick wins. Learn what works for your business and pilot your initial automation tasks to test how they work. Eventually, begin scaling as you gain insights from smaller projects to inform larger, more impactful ones.
• Focus on security: Although your team may not be working with data manually as much, security is still a must with IT automation. Integrate secure protocols at every layer of your systems and processes. Look at your regulatory requirements to determine your needs, and regularly audit your systems to identify potential weaknesses.
• Document everything: If things go wrong, you need detailed records about your automation process. Create documents that detail every system, automation tools and scripts that belong to those systems, and common troubleshooting tips for quickly dealing with problems. Make documentation available to team members so all your team members can look up how things work and manage their designated automation systems.
• Monitor performance: Establish metrics that indicate the success of your automation efforts. Look for improvements in uptime, response time, and other performance data. Regularly look for areas that don’t meet your performance metrics and investigate areas of improvement.

IT Automation Pros and Cons

Here are some pros and cons of automation for those working in IT:

Pros

• Enhanced productivity (improved workflows, higher production rates, better use of technologies and human resources, freeing up IT resources, etc.).
• Better customer/client outcomes (improved SLAs, faster and more consistent services, higher-quality outputs, enhanced business relationships, etc.).
• Reduced total cost of ownership (auto-discovery tools prevent expensive errors, freeing up labor resources, automatic discovery of cost-cutting technologies, etc.).

Cons

• Automation requires an initial cost investment and engineers’ time to set up. That’s why IT-focused companies should choose a cost-effective automation platform that generates an ongoing return on investment. 
• Some team members may find it difficult to adopt automation technologies. The best course of action is to select a simplified automation tool.
• Automation may amplify security issues. Software and configuration vulnerabilities can quickly spread in your organization before being detected, which means security considerations and testing must be done before introducing automation.

Read more: The Leading Hybrid Observability Powered by AI Platform for MSPs

Will IT automation replace jobs?

There’s a misconception that IT automation will cause job losses. While this might prove true for some sectors, such as manufacturing, IT-focused companies have little to worry about. That’s because automation tools don’t work in silos. Skilled IT professionals need to customize automation tools based on organizational requirements and client demands. MSPs that use ML, for example, need to define and determine the algorithms that identify real-time trends in data. ML models might generate data trends automatically, but MSPs still need to select the data sets that feed those models. 

Even if automation takes over the responsibilities of a specific team member within an IT organization, executives can upskill or reskill that employee instead of replacing them. According to LogicMonitor’s Future of the MSP Industry Research Report, 95% of MSP leaders agree that automation is the key to helping businesses achieve strategic goals and innovation. By training employees who currently carry out manual tasks, executives can develop a stronger, higher-skilled workforce that still benefits from IT automation.

Future of IT automation

AI, machine learning, and cloud computing advancements are significantly altering how businesses manage their IT infrastructure. As these technologies continue to evolve, how you manage your business will change along with them.

Here’s what to expect in the future of IT automation:

Intelligent automation

Traditional automation tools use a rules-based approach: a certain event (e.g., time of day, hardware failure, log events) triggers an action through the automation systems.

Advanced AI operations tools are changing that with their ability to predict future events based on data. That leads to more intelligent automation that doesn’t require a rules-based system. These systems understand natural language, recognize patterns, and make decisions based on real-time data. They allow for more responsive IT systems that anticipate and fix problems.

Hybrid cloud automation

The growing adoption of cloud environments—which include private, public, and on-prem resources—requires your business to adopt new strategies to manage infrastructure and automate tasks. You need tools that seamlessly integrate with all environments to ensure performance and compliance where the data resides.

Hybrid environments also allow for more flexibility and scalability for IT infrastructure. Instead of being limited by physical constraints, your business can use the cloud to scale computing resources as much as needed. Automated provisioning and deployment means you can do this at scale with minimal IT resources.

Edge computing automation

As workforces and companies become more distributed, your business needs a way to provide resources to customers and employees in different regions. This may mean a web service for customers or a way for employees to access business services.

Edge devices can help supply resources. Automation will help your business manage edge devices, process data on the edge, and ensure you offer performant applications to customers and employees who need them.

Choosing the right IT automation platform

Successful data-driven IT teams require technology that scales as their business does, providing CIOs and executives with ongoing value. LogicMonitor is the world’s only cloud-based hybrid infrastructure monitoring platform that automates tasks for IT service companies like MSPs. 

LogicMonitor features include: 

• An all-in-one monitoring platform that revolutionizes digital transformation for MSPs and DevOps/ITOps teams worldwide.
• Complete 360-degree visibility of utilization, network performance, resource consumption, cloud instances, and much more. 
• Full observability of technologies and resources such as servers, data centers, and cloud-based environments.
• The ability to identify problems with legacy tools before they happen.
• Real-time reports and forecasts that reduce internal costs, improve SLA outcomes, and power engineers and other IT professionals. 
• No additional hardware maintenance or technical resources. LogicMonitor is ready out of the box.

Final Word

IT automation has revolutionized the IT sector, reducing the manual responsibilities that, for years, have plagued this industry. MSPs no longer need to enter network performance data into multiple systems, physically inspect servers, manage and provision networks manually, analyze performance reports, or perform other redundant tasks manually. Automation does a lot of the hard work so that these IT professionals can focus on far more critical tasks. By incorporating cloud-based infrastructure monitoring, AI, machine learning, and other new technologies, your IT executives improve productivity, enhance workflows, reduce IT resources, promote better client outcomes, and reduce costs over time.

What is WMI?

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is the primary method for obtaining information from Windows for various systems. It provides specific data regarding configurations and overall performance to help DevOps and administrators monitor and automate tasks.

You might worry about network security and whether the WMI Provider Host (WmiPrvSE.exe) is safe. Yes, it is. Many aspects of your personal computer wouldn’t function without it. These are some general purposes that the WMI Provider Host fulfills for users:

• It gives information as a task manager to assorted applications without requiring direct action from the user.
• It offers information regarding event log entries, internal data storage status, and even the motherboard model number. 
• It has a set of extensions in the Windows Driver Model. This includes an interface with components that provide notifications and other types of information.
• It allows third-party software to query operating information.
• It reduces the cost and maintenance of managing network components.

Security considerations

Potential security risks related to WMI provider host

While the WMI Provider Host (WmiPrvSE.exe) is an essential component of the Windows operating system, it can pose potential security risks if not properly managed. Malicious actors can exploit WMI for various types of attacks, such as:

• Unauthorized access: If a system’s WMI settings are not properly configured, unauthorized users may gain access to sensitive information or system configurations.
• Malware exploitation: Malware can leverage WMI to execute scripts or commands, retrieve system information, and perform other malicious activities without detection.
• Privilege escalation: Poorly configured WMI permissions can allow attackers to escalate their privileges on a system, potentially gaining control over critical components.

Best practices for securing the WMI provider host

To mitigate potential security risks, it’s important to follow best practices for securing the WMI Provider Host:

1. Restrict WMI access
   • Ensure that only authorized users and applications have access to WMI. Use Group Policy settings to manage and restrict WMI permissions.
   • Review and update access control lists (ACLs) regularly to ensure they comply with the principle of least privilege.
2. Monitor WMI activity
   • Continuously monitor WMI activity logs for any unusual or suspicious behavior. Use tools like the Event Viewer to track and analyze WMI events.
   • Implement a centralized logging system to consolidate and review WMI logs from multiple systems.
3. Keep systems updated
   • Apply security patches and updates regularly to your operating system and related components. This helps protect against known vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit.
   • Enable automatic updates to ensure your system remains protected against the latest threats.
4. Implement network security measures
   • Use firewalls and network segmentation to limit access to WMI-enabled systems. This can help contain potential attacks and prevent lateral movement within your network.
   • Configure network security groups and access control lists (ACLs) to restrict inbound and outbound traffic related to WMI.
5. Use strong authentication and encryption
   • Implement strong authentication methods, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), for accessing WMI. This adds an additional layer of security to prevent unauthorized access.
   • Ensure that WMI communications are encrypted to protect sensitive information from being intercepted during transmission.

What is a provider host?

A provider host allows third-party software to interact with and query operating system information. It’s important to note that, besides the Windows WMI providers, there are sometimes other providers on your system. Microsoft and third-party developers may install other apps on your computer that use different types of providers. If you experience problems with your system, you may need to use troubleshooting determine which WMI provider is causing the issue.

According to Microsoft, several hosting model values exist for providers operating within the Wmiprvse.exe process. These are a few examples of values in _Win32Provider.HostingModel.

• NetworkServiceHost: If the WMI provider’s hosting model is not specified, this is the default model beginning with Windows Vista. This type limits the possibility of privilege attacks.
• LocalSystemHost: If the provider is in process, it’s part of a shared host within LocalSystem.
• LocalServiceHost: If its implementation is in progress, the provider is part of the Wmiprvse.exe process under the LocalService account.
• SelfHost: Instead of using an in-process model, the provider works through a local server implementation.

Why is a provider host important?

A provider host enables different applications to request information about how your system is operating. The host will normally run in the background when supporting your computer. Some of the important features that a WMI provider host provides include the following:

• .Net Management Capabilities: The existing WMI provider and all its classes are available to every .NET application.
• Automation Capabilities: Automation interfaces are part of the WMI operating system and ready for use.
• Event Capabilities: Through the WMI, a subscriber can receive notifications for a variety of events. WMI uses query language to submit event queries.
• Remote Capabilities: WMI providers offer more than local COM ability. This includes DCOM transports and sometimes SOAP requests and responses.

Integration with system management tools

The WMI Provider Host integrates seamlessly with various system management and monitoring tools. These tools, such as Microsoft System Center, Nagios, and LogicMonitor, use WMI to gather detailed system information, monitor performance, and automate administrative tasks. This integration allows administrators to access real-time data and manage systems more efficiently.

Benefits of leveraging these integrations for better system management

• Improved monitoring: By leveraging WMI integrations, administrators can monitor system health, performance, and configurations in real time, allowing for quicker identification and resolution of issues.
• Enhanced automation: Integrating WMI with management tools enables the automation of routine administrative tasks, such as system updates, backups, and resource allocation, reducing manual workload and minimizing errors.
• Centralized management: WMI integration allows for centralized management of multiple systems from a single interface, simplifying complex environments and improving operational efficiency.
• Comprehensive reporting: Management tools using WMI can generate detailed reports on system performance, security, and compliance, helping organizations make informed decisions and maintain regulatory standards.
• Scalability: WMI integrations support the management of large-scale environments, making it easier to scale operations and maintain control over extensive IT infrastructures.

How do you access WMI events and manage WMI service configuration?

When you install Windows, the WMI automatically begins. If you’re looking for the WMI Provider Host on your system, you can find it by following these instructions:

• Press X and the Windows logo key at the same time (You can also right-click the start button on Windows 8 or 10). This is how you view verbose WMI activity events.
• Click the Event Viewer.
• Click the View button.
• Click Analytic and Debug Logs.
• Click on Applications and Service Logs (on the left side of the screen).
• Follow the path from Applications and Service Logs to Microsoft to Windows and then to WMI-Activity.

Another way to access the WMI Provider:

• Right-click the Windows logo/start and choose “Computer Management.”
• Then, click “Services and Applications.”
• Right-click on WMI Control.
• Select Properties.

What are some tips to keep your WMI provider host working effectively?

You may need these tips to keep your WMI provider running smoothly:

Monitor for High CPU Issues

To diagnose high CPU usage by Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) on Windows, start by identifying whether WmiPrvse.exe or svchost.exe (hosting the Winmgmt service) is causing the issue. 

Open Task Manager, enable the PID column, and locate the process-consuming CPU. Use Performance Monitor (Perfmon) for a graphical view of CPU usage per process. If svchost.exe is the cause, isolate the Winmgmt service by running sc config Winmgmt type= own in an elevated command prompt and restarting it, which allows tracking WMI independently. 

Finally, investigate the specific WMI providers and client processes responsible using tools like Event Viewer, Process Explorer, or scripts, focusing on high-frequency queries and tasks tied to the identified process.

Disabling WMI

While turning off the WMI system is possible, you’re strongly advised not to do this. It is a crucial element of your Microsoft Windows 10 operating system, and if you deactivate it, most Windows software won’t operate correctly. Your WMI Provider Host is a system service that you shouldn’t turn off or disable.

How to Fix WMI Provider Host

To address high CPU usage by WMI Provider Host (WmiPrvSE.exe), it’s essential to run a thorough virus and malware scan to rule out any malicious software as a potential cause. Malicious programs often disguise themselves as system processes, like WMI, to avoid detection while consuming CPU and memory resources. 

Start by updating your antivirus software and performing a full system scan. Additionally, use a trusted anti-malware tool to detect threats that antivirus might miss. If the scan identifies malware, follow the removal steps carefully and restart your system. 

This step is crucial because resolving any underlying infections often restores normal CPU usage and protects your system’s performance and stability.

Safe Mode

If malware is detected and difficult to remove, restarting your computer in Safe Mode can help. Safe Mode runs only essential Windows processes, blocking most third-party programs and malware from starting up, making it easier to identify and remove persistent threats. 

To enter Safe Mode, restart your computer, and press the F8 or Shift+Restart key (depending on your system) to access the advanced startup options. Choose Safe Mode with Networking to allow internet access if you need to download additional scanning tools. 

Once in Safe Mode, rerun your antivirus and anti-malware scans. This environment often improves the effectiveness of removal tools, helping to clear out threats more completely and ensuring your system can run WMI Provider Host without interference from malicious software.

Conclusion

A WMI Provider Host is a necessary part of your operating system. It provides essential information, helps APIs run efficiently, and facilitates cloud computing. Keeping your WMI Provider Host running smoothly will help you successfully manage everything from operational environments to remote systems. While generally safe, it requires careful management to mitigate potential security risks. Restricting access, monitoring activity, and keeping systems updated can ensure an efficient and effective Windows environment supporting local and remote system management.

Terraform and Pulumi are both Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools. They allow you to manage, provision, and configure your infrastructure using code, which makes it easy to automate your infrastructure deployments and manage them in a version control system.

Terraform is an open source tool developed by Hashicorp. It’s popular among developers because it’s easy to use and has a wide range of community-developed plugins and integrations.

Pulumi is a newer tool developed by a startup of the same name. It’s also open source and aims to be more developer-friendly than Terraform. In addition, it supports a wider range of programming languages and is more extensible than Terraform.

In this article, we look into IaC, as well as the main uses and benefits of both Terraform and Pulumi. We’ll also examine the differences and similarities between the two.

Contents:

• What is IaC?
• What is Terraform?
• What is Pulumi?
• What are the similarities between Terraform and Pulumi?
• What are the differences between Terraform and Pulumi?
• Factors to consider when choosing between Pulumi and Terraform
• Which tool is better: Terraform or Pulumi?

What is IaC?

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the process of managing, provisioning, and configuring computing infrastructure using machine-readable definition files rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.

With IaC, the entire infrastructure can be deployed and managed automatically and consistently, according to the definition files. This makes IaC an important part of DevOps, as it enables infrastructure to be treated like code and thus subject to the same processes and tools as application code.

The benefits of IaC in today’s world include:

• Enables you to manage your infrastructure as code, which means it can be treated like any other code, and thus be version-controlled, reviewed, etc
• Allows you to automate the provisioning of infrastructure, which reduces the chances of human error and makes it possible to provision infrastructure much faster
• Enables you to replicate your infrastructure easily and consistently
• Allows you to manage your infrastructure in a declarative way, which means you can describe the desired state of your infrastructure, and the IaC tool will take care of provisioning accordingly

What is Terraform?

Terraform is a popular but older tool with vast platform support and documentation. Terraform is easy to get started with, even if you’re unfamiliar with IaC. It uses its own proprietary language, HCL, and it has a wide range of community-developed modules that can be used to automate the provisioning of almost any kind of infrastructure.

What language does Terraform use?

Terraform uses the Domain Specific Language (DSL) known as Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). HCL is declarative, meaning Terraform code defines what infrastructure should look like, rather than the steps that should be taken to create that infrastructure.

Terraform code can also be written in JSON, but HCL is the recommended language as it’s explicitly designed for Terraform.

Benefits/drawbacks of HCL

One of the benefits of Terraform’s HCL is that it’s human-readable and easy to learn if you’re familiar with other programming languages. Plus, because HCL is designed for Terraform, it’s easier to use than JSON. Terraform’s HCL is also not as widely used as JSON, making it more difficult to find community support.

Main uses of Terraform

Terraform can be used for a wide range of cloud-based infrastructure deployments. It’s often used to provision and manage resources in public clouds, such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Terraform can also be used to provision and manage on-premises resources, such as servers, networking gear, and storage.

Terraform is often used to manage resources in multiple cloud providers simultaneously. This is known as multi-cloud deployments. Terraform’s multi-cloud capabilities make it a popular choice for those who want the flexibility to deploy resources in any cloud.

Main benefits of using Terraform

Terraform’s main benefits include its wide platform support, ease of use, and community modules. Terraform’s wide platform support means it can be used to manage almost any type of infrastructure. Meanwhile, Terraform’s ease of use and stability makes it a good choice for those new to IaC and open to learning HCL. Indeed, its uniform syntax for describing the infrastructure is one of its greatest strengths.

Terraform’s community modules make it easy to find code to automate the provisioning of almost any type of infrastructure.

What is Pulumi

Pulumi is a newer, developer-friendly tool that’s also fast-growing. Pulumi is open source and supports many languages, not just its own, and it integrates well with popular DevOps tools. It uses programming languages familiar to many developers, which makes learning it easy.

Pulumi, despite being newer, now offers comprehensive platform support and detailed documentation comparable to Terraform. Pulumi provides extensive, step-by-step guides on installation, getting started, and core concepts. Additionally, Pulumi offers detailed documentation and examples for multiple cloud providers.

Whether you are looking for popular providers like AWS or less-common ones like PagerDuty, Pulumi’s documentation is thorough and robust. While Pulumi’s website is a valuable resource, its active Slack community and GitHub repository also offer significant support and examples, enhancing the overall user experience.

What languages does Pulumi use?

Pulumi supports many languages, each equally capable. Currently, Pulumi supports the following languages:

• Go
• Java
• Python
• .NET (C#, F#, VB)
• Node.js (JavaScript and TypeScript)
• Pulumi YAML

Since Pulumi is open source, you can even add your own language if it isn’t listed.

One of the benefits of using multiple languages is that it makes Pulumi more accessible to a wide range of developers. It also allows Pulumi to integrate with any number of DevOps tools. Pulumi also has integrations with popular DevOps tools, such as Ansible, Terraform, and Chef.

However, one of the drawbacks of using multiple languages is that it can make Pulumi more difficult to learn for those new to IaC, especially since community support for Pulumi is somewhat limited. 

Main uses of Pulumi

Pulumi can be used for a wide range of cloud-based infrastructure deployments. As a modern IaC, Pulumi leverages existing programming languages and their native ecosystems to interact with cloud resources. Thanks to a downloadable command line interface (CLI), runtime, libraries, and a hosted service, Pulimi offers a robust way to manage cloud infrastructure, as well as provisioning and updating it.

Main benefits of using Pulumi

Some of the main benefits of using Pulumi include its ease of use, wide range of integrations, and growing community.

Pulumi’s ease of use makes it a good choice, especially if you’re new to IaC. The familiar programming languages make it easier to get started, especially since you don’t have to learn an entirely new language like Terraform’s HCL. Plus, Pulumi’s wide range of integrations is ideal if you want to use a tool that integrates well with your existing workflow.

Pulumi provides support for native providers by generating them directly from the cloud provider’s API. Essentially, when a cloud provider adds support for new features or resources, Pulumi gets access quickly.

Pulumi’s growing community is another benefit. Due to its use of popular programming languages, Pulumi has been able to attract many developers. This has led to a small but growing community that can offer support and expertise. It has also fostered collaboration, which is critical to faster innovation. These and other benefits of Pulumi may encourage you to move from Terraform.

What are the similarities between Terraform and Pulumi?

Both Terraform and Pulumi support a wide range of cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This means you can use either Terraform or Pulumi to provision and manage infrastructure on any of these cloud providers.

Both Terraform and Pulumi are also open source, which means you can use either Terraform or Pulumi for free and modify the code to suit your needs.

In terms of functionality, Terraform and Pulumi are very similar. Both tools can be used to manage infrastructure in the public cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment.

Both Terraform and Pulumi use declarative configuration files. This means you define what your infrastructure should look like, and Terraform or Pulumi will provision and update your infrastructure to match your specifications.

What Are the Differences Between Terraform and Pulumi?

While both Terraform and Pulumi are declarative tools, Pulumi uses general-purpose imperative languages. This means Terraform automatically generates the infrastructure based on the code that’s written, while Pulumi requires the user to write code that specifically describes the infrastructure.

When it comes to the ability to adopt existing infrastructure into IaC, both Terraform and Pulumi support importing infrastructure. However, Pulumi goes a step further and generates code that matches the imported resources.

Terraform also has a wider range of resources for provisioning and managing infrastructure, so it can be used for more complex deployments than Pulumi.

Pulumi is also a newer tool than Terraform. Because Pulumi is still growing and evolving, it may not be as stable as Terraform. However, that means Pulumi can learn from the mistakes Terraform has made, and that it can innovate faster.

Additionally, Pulumi’s integration with Terraform providers means it can support more providers than Terraform.

In terms of language support, Terraform only supports HCL, while Pulumi supports many languages, including Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and .NET.

Pulumi also offers Dynamic Provider Support, which Terraform does not. Pulumi can automatically generate Terraform providers and support new resources and features much faster than Terraform. Pulumi can also generate credentials for Terraform providers, which Terraform cannot do.

Lastly, Pulumi and Terraform approach state management differently. Terraform uses a state file to track the resources it has created, while Pulumi uses Pulumi service to track the resources created.

The Pulumi service also offers several advantages, including the ability to share state across teams. You can also use Pulumi’s policy engine to enforce governance policies. With Pulumi, developers can leverage Pulumi service and any general-purpose language to write code and manage state. Developers can even convert their HCL code into Pulumi via tf2pulumi.

Terraform, on the other hand, handles its own state management. By default, it requires you to manually manage state and concurrency using state files. The implication here is that getting started with Pulumi and operationalizing it in a team environment is much easier than with Terraform.

Factors to consider when choosing between Pulumi and Terraform

When deciding between Pulumi and Terraform for your Infrastructure as Code (IaC) needs, several key factors should be taken into account to ensure you choose the tool that best fits your specific requirements and team capabilities.

Team expertise and language familiarity

If your team is proficient in general-purpose programming languages such as JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Go, or .NET, Pulumi might be the more intuitive choice. Pulumi allows you to write infrastructure code using familiar languages, reducing the learning curve and leveraging existing development skills.

For teams that prefer a specialized, declarative language for infrastructure management, Terraform’s HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) is straightforward and easy to learn. HCL’s simplicity and readability make it accessible for those new to IaC.

Project complexity and requirements

Pulumi excels in complex scenarios where the flexibility of general-purpose programming languages is advantageous. If your infrastructure management involves intricate logic, conditional configurations, or integration with application code, Pulumi provides the necessary flexibility.

Terraform is well-suited for straightforward infrastructure management tasks and is highly effective for multi-cloud deployments. Its declarative approach simplifies the definition of infrastructure resources and makes it easier to maintain and understand.

Integration and ecosystem needs

Pulumi integrates seamlessly with existing development tools and workflows. It supports a wide range of integrations with popular DevOps tools such as Ansible, Chef, and existing Terraform providers. If integration with existing tools and workflows is a priority, Pulumi’s flexibility offers significant advantages.

Terraform’s extensive ecosystem and mature community support provide a vast array of pre-built modules and providers. Its stability and widespread adoption mean there is a wealth of resources, tutorials, and community support for third-party integrations available, making it easier to find solutions.

Community support

Pulumi, being newer, has a growing community. Its innovative features attract many developers, and its community is active on platforms like GitHub and Slack. Although Pulumi has grown significantly in recent years, adding lots of documentation to the platform, it still may not have as many resources.

Terraform’s mature and extensive community means better support, more tutorials, and a wide range of community-developed modules. Its long-standing presence in the IaC space ensures a stable and reliable tool with comprehensive documentation.

Cost and licensing considerations

Pulumi is open source, but some of its advanced features and enterprise offerings come with a cost. Evaluate the licensing model and any associated costs if you plan to use Pulumi’s premium features.

Terraform is also open source, with HashiCorp offering Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise for additional features and support. Consider the costs of these premium offerings if advanced collaboration and governance features are needed.

Which Tool is Better: Terraform or Pulumi?

Both Terraform and Pulumi have their own advantages and disadvantages. Terraform is a more mature tool, and may have a wider range of resources. Many ask why Pulumi over Terraform? Pulumi is easier to use, now has a significant load of documentation, and is constantly improving thanks to its growing community.

In the end, the best tool for you depends on your needs. If you need a more stable tool with a deeper resource and knowledge base, Terraform may be the better choice. However, if you need a tool that’s easier to use and constantly improving, Pulumi may be the better choice.

Ultimately, while Terraform and Pulumi both have their benefits, Pulumi offers some advantages that Terraform doesn’t. These advantages may make Pulumi the better choice for your needs.

Ready to take your infrastructure to the next level? Schedule a demo with LogicMonitor today and discover how we help companies transform what’s next to deliver extraordinary employee and customer experiences. Let’s chat.

Christina Kosmowski, CEO of LogicMonitor, is here today to introduce the latest innovations for our quarterly Summer 2023 Launch, which is focused on extending visibility wherever your business demands through unified monitoring across your entire hybrid cloud ecosystem!

How is it already August? As I look back at the intensely busy spring and summer we had here at LogicMonitor, I can’t help but romanticize the idea of journeys and road trips. The feeling of sunshine coming through the front windscreen, the anticipation bubbling when you peep the next sight on your itinerary, the longing for an ice-cold popsicle at the next pit stop. 

August also brings with it the excitement of unveiling our Summer Launch features: the capabilities we took care to improve upon – or build from scratch – based on the destinations our users told us they are trying to reach. You asked for easier access to metrics that matter, so we built intuitive out-of-the-box dashboards and workflows, offering simplicity without compromising on customization. You asked for more efficient ways to optimize resources from the start, so we automated more laborious processes. A hallmark of this launch is our customer-centric commitment to flexibility, ensuring that with LM in the passenger’s seat, the sun never sets on your business’ journey to modernization.

-Christina Kosmowski
CEO, LogicMonitor

Intelligence and Automation

LogicMonitor has always utilized intelligence and automation through agentless collectors to automatically discover new devices and configuration changes, prebuilt workflows, intelligent alerting with dynamic alert thresholds, and logs-based anomaly detection.

We are excited to announce several new features to drive our customers’ ability to surface key insights while reducing alert fatigue and cutting back on manual tasks. These include a controlled release of Edwin AI, Datapoint Analysis, Logs Query Tracking, a new Jira Service Management integration, and a beta release of Event-Driven Ansible.

Edwin AI 

Edwin AI ingests events from LM Envision and seamlessly transforms them into episodes. Advanced machine learning techniques automatically identify features in the alert data to correlate the disparate alerts into connected insights based on time, resources involved, environment, and other significant features of the enriched alert data.

Furthermore, Edwin AI’s insights use advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automatically summarize the alerts in a correlation into their most succinct form, vastly reducing the time it takes for support teams to reason about the mass of alerts and drive down MTTR.

The resulting streamlined list of specific actions gives ITOps, Engineers, DevOps, and MLOps teams the time, space, and data needed to prioritize resolving business-critical issues faster than their competitors. 

Other capabilities include:

• Adaptive correlation – Edwin AI will automatically re-cluster alerts when it identifies a more optimal clustering option. This avoids any delay in escalating insights to ServiceNOW.
• Extensible correlation – Create user defined correlation models to target the alert and enriched CMDB data that makes sense for your business. You define how your correlations behave.
• ServiceNow Ready – Automatically enriches Edwin AI alerts with ServiceNOW CMDB data to drive additional context for ML correlations. Edwin AI includes a seamless bi-directional integration with ServiceNOW Incident module.
• MSP Ready – Edwin AI supports multi-tenancy with correlations scoped to each tenant.

Edwin AI represents our latest step in delivering AIOps to our customers – whether enterprise or MSPs! To learn how LogicMonitor leverages AIOps, visit https://logicmonitor.com/aiops 

Datapoint Analysis 

Datapoint Analysis uses advanced machine learning techniques to narrow down the list of metrics across different resources to surface a common pattern during a time of incident. 

In the past, users had to search for additional, related metrics in order to diagnose an issue on the Resources page, which takes significant time and effort. This new feature, which is currently in Beta, provides relevant, correlated metrics to help practitioners reduce MTTR and increase productivity. 

Logs Query Tracking

Logs Query Tracking creates LM datapoints from log data such as number of events and anomalies for KPI and trend analysis. In the past, it was difficult to provide business insights and track trends in log data. Now, when you mark a saved search for tracking, the query runs every 5 minutes and stores the number of logs and number of anomalies as instance data. Having this information as metrics helps customers view trends over time in LogicMonitor Dashboards and create alerts with static and dynamic thresholds when log counts fall outside an expected range. For more information about Logs Query Tracking, visit https://logicmonitor.com/support/logs-query-tracking. To learn about LM Logs, visit https://logicmonitor.com/logs.

Jira Service Management 

LogicMonitor’s new fully released Jira Service Management integration is a bi-directional ticketing integration jointly developed with Atlassian to automate your incident management workflows in Jira based on LogicMonitor alerts. This integration enables LogicMonitor to create, update, and close Jira incidents based on LogicMonitor alerts. It also enables Jira to acknowledge alerts based on incident status.

Event-Driven Ansible 

LogicMonitor has partnered with Red Hat to launch Event-Driven Ansible, a jointly developed solution to assist with auto-remediation and auto-troubleshooting. By integrating with the industry standard configuration management tool, we are allowing our customers to trigger remediation workflows on the basis of an alert, so when Event-Driven Ansible receives alerts from LogicMonitor, it can automatically determine the next steps and act in accordance with predefined rules. 

When an event is triggered, Event-Driven Ansible will automatically execute the desired action via Ansible Playbooks or direct execution modules, with the ability to chain multiple events together into more complex automation actions. To learn more about our Ansible integration visit: https://logicmonitor.com/support/ansible-integration 

If you are interested in signing up for a Closed Beta (available for LogicMonitor customers who have enabled UIv4), please contact your Customer Success Manager or Account Executive.

Unified Platform Experience

The LogicMonitor team has been hard at work creating new features that help customers easily access the metrics that matter and maximize productivity with a more cohesive and intuitive product experience. These features include a new UI, cloud updates, Log ingestion and Log alerts enhancements, and new capabilities in DEM (Digital Experience Monitoring) like Synthetic web checks.

UIv4

LM Envision’s new UIv4 offers a modern and intelligent new platform design built to maximize user productivity, offer intuitive platform administration, and provide a smarter, cohesive, and accessible experience.  With LM Envision’s new UI, LogicMonitor customers can focus on uptime and business-critical initiatives at speed and scale to propel their observability journey forward. 

LM Envision’s New UI provides the fewest clicks to get users where they are trying to go, intuitive next steps, pre-set defaults, consistency of bulk actions, better search and filtering, all coupled together with modern react components that make for fast, reliable, consistent execution of common tasks. The new UI offers:

• Improved usability to optimize IT workflows, reducing the complexities enterprises commonly face across their hybrid and multi-cloud environments
• Increased productivity to perform actions faster and leverage tightly integrated automation capabilities to proactively resolve issues before they cause business disruptions
• Intuitive instrumentation to immediately access meaningful data when you need it with a modern look and feel so you can focus on business-critical initiatives 
• Consistent platform-wide experience with tree navigation, search, filters, icon placement, and more for increased clarity and efficient access to key information

It’s easy to switch over to the new UI – simply click the toggle switch in the header! For more information, visit https://logicmonitor.com/support/resources-new-ui-overview.

Cloud

We recently added new support for AWS, Azure and Kubernetes in Topology Mapping, so customers can now visually see which resources are connected, and use this for troubleshooting. 

In addition, LogicMonitor now has 20 new Azure and AWS out-of-the-box dashboards which will help us deliver value to the customer and decrease time to value. These new dashboards will highlight key metrics and provide useful service-specific views for understanding service health, performance, and availability. In addition, the dashboards populate automatically for new cloud accounts added into LogicMonitor. For existing accounts, you can find the dashboard definitions in our AWS GitHub repository and Azure GitHub Repository and import the JSON file directly into your LogicMonitor account. For more information, see Importing Dashboards in the product documentation.

Logs 

LogSource UI is a new graphical UI for simplifying log collection and configurations, that allows for log enrichment by adding metadata values. In the past, LM Logs Collection required configuration file edits which could be difficult and confusing for some users. LogSource UI simplifies the setup and configuration for log collection so it’s easier to bring log data into LM Log enrichment. 

In addition, we have added advanced enrichment capabilities so users can add additional data to their logs for faster searching and filtering. For example, they could add LM Properties to the logs and search based on those values. For more information, visit https://logicmonitor.com/support/logsource-overview 

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)

Synthetic Web Checks provides Selenium based recorded web checks with multiple steps and MFA support. In the past, customers could only see timing information for the entirety of the test. Now you can create a test with multiple steps to logically group all your website’s operations, where each step is treated as an individual device. This helps you navigate through all of your website’s operations, and provides granular slicing of the data to display information that is more relevant for alerting and troubleshooting. 

SaaS Monitoring 

In SaaS monitoring, we added support for M365 logs and Okta logs so users can clearly understand why problems happen, pinpoint the root cause of anomalies, and quickly troubleshoot with M365 logs (including Azure AD, Sharepoint, Exchange, General Audit, and DLP) and Okta logs alongside alerts. 

In the past, customers had no easy way to get M365 logs or Okta logs into LogicMonitor. By combining metrics and logs, customers will have a better troubleshooting experience to help them further reduce MTTR. For more information about our SaaS monitoring solution, please visit https://logicmonitor.com/saas-monitoring 

Extensibility

LogicMonitor gives customers the flexibility and control to monitor your entire IT environment, eliminate blind spots to prevent downtime, while propelling enterprise growth and transformation. To that end, we have expanded support across our entire portfolio including Platform, Cloud and Container Monitoring. 

Platform

As part of our Cloud-managed networking offering, we recently added native integrations to simplify onboarding and streamline monitoring for Cisco Meraki, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN, and Palo Alto Prisma SD-WAN, with HPE Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN coming soon.

LogicMonitor has also added a new Wireless Access Points SKU with support for Cisco Meraki and Juniper Mist. Monitoring wireless access points as discrete resources, rather than instances, makes it easier to count how many devices a customer has, while providing richer data, a better user experience, and access to more LM features. The Wireless Access Points SKU also provides an affordable price at less than one-fifth of the current Network Monitoring list price. 

In addition, our customers can now experience next generation coverage monitoring for VMware vSphere, to provide faster discovery and onboarding of new ESXi Hosts and Virtual Machines, and rationalize data points to reduce redundant alerts.

Cloud

We know your cloud deployments span multiple cloud providers, which is why we’ve expanded our Azure offering to help you contain costs across your multi cloud estate and maximize your Azure investments. Azure cost management by tag will help you: 

• Quickly adjust resources and accurately predict your Azure spend 
• Define custom Azure tags (such as application, environment, createdBy) to analyze costs based on region, application, or custom groupings, and see where costs are allocated 
• Clearly see over and underutilized resources to optimize workloads and eliminate unnecessary costs 

To learn how to gain deeper insights from your Azure data alongside your on-premises estate, check out our webinar, “On-demand Going Beyond Azure Monitoring with LogicMonitor.”

Our new coverage of Azure Premium FrontDoor allows you to get visibility into FrontDoor performance data and metrics for better visibility into network health and user experience, alongside the rest of their hybrid environment. This will enable you to:

• Reliably reach your users, scale confidently, and reduce content delivery costs
• Gain visibility into user traffic patterns to predict demand changes, identify bottlenecks, and quickly make decisions to optimize application performance and customer experience

We’ve also added a MongoDB Atlas Integration to enable you to monitor Atlas managed databases with LogicMonitor’s cloud (API-based) integration. MongoDB Atlas database resources discovered are billed as cloud resources. With this integration, customers can:

• Gain real-time visibility and proactive anomaly detection across your MongoDB Atlas databases
• Monitor key metrics such as CPU and memory usage, throughput, and disk metrics to identify issues and quickly take action 
• Proactively detect anomalies in your clusters to address performance issues and prevent unplanned downtime.  

On July 26th, we also announced our expanded relationship with AWS, showcasing our hybrid multi cloud monitoring coverage, and describing the tremendous innovation we offer to help AWS customers accelerate their cloud migration, reduce risk, and visualize their hybrid estate. Learn more here: logicmonitor.com/blog/extend-visibility-wherever-your-business-demands   

Container monitoring

As your deployments mature and your developers orchestrate multiple containerized applications, we added several new container monitoring features to make management and troubleshooting easier. These improvements include: 

• Certified compatibility with support for Kubernetes 1.25 and 1.26
• LM Container charts, that help you get started quickly with consolidated helm charts, to easily manage complex deployments and ensure consistency across environments.
• Support for monitoring Kubernetes Helms Charts, which helps customers:
  • Clearly see the health and performance of your Kubernetes applications
  • Quickly respond when configured metrics exceed thresholds or deviate from patterns and take action on critical issues to detect issues or anomalies early on 
• Support for monitoring Kubernetes API server and scheduler, so you can make real-time capacity planning decisions to adjust ephemeral resources according to demand changes. 

More Information

Missed our Summer Launch webinar? Don’t worry, you can still catch all the details and demos! We hosted a webinar on August 22nd featuring LogicMonitor’s Chief Product Officer, Taggart Matthieson, and LogicMonitor’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Bill Emmett. They discussed how our latest product innovations can help you unlock intelligence and extensibility in your hybrid IT environments. You can watch the recorded session here: LogicMonitor Webinar

Have questions or feedback about the new features discussed in the webinar and blog? We held an Ask Me Anything (AMA) event with our Product Managers on August 29th. You can read the recap or continue the conversation in our LM Community: Summer Launch AMA

Think about all the IT tasks you carry out in your business. Now, imagine you could automate these jobs and shift your focus to more important assignments. Ansible could prove to be a solution to your IT challenges. It’s a software tool that streamlines IT operations, freeing up resources and labor in your organization. Learn more about Ansible and how it can help your company below.

Overview of Ansible

Ansible is a software platform that automates many of the manual and repetitive IT tasks in your organization. Written in Python, Ansible can carry out jobs such as configuration management, updating systems, deploying applications, and installing software. Most operating systems support Ansible’s command line tools, including Windows, MacOS, and Ubuntu.

Ansible comes in two iterations. You can access the original open-source version or subscribe to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, which includes additional features, such as customer support, for a monthly fee. Red Hat doesn’t publish pricing on its website, so you’ll need to contact them for a personalized quote. This article will use “Ansible” to describe both versions of the technology.

Why is automation important in ITOps?

Automation is critical for IT departments because it reduces or eliminates time-consuming and menial tasks that deplete your team’s resources. For example, manually updating systems with the latest security updates. That frees up your team to focus on more productive jobs, such as scaling your IT operations in the cloud or improving digital transformation.

Automating IT tasks can also save you money. By streamlining manual and low-value jobs, you can reduce labor requirements and reinvest these savings back into your business. Automation can also speed up ITOps by completing tasks in a faster timeframe than any human can.

Ansible makes IT automation easy with its range of features. Use this software to reduce human errors during IT processes, deploy applications more effectively, and increase productivity and performance.

Using Ansible

Though it doesn’t require a lot of code, using Ansible demands a learning curve. Here are some of the various components of Ansible’s framework:

Agentless architecture

Ansible’s architecture includes a control node and a managed node. You execute Ansible from the former and automate devices from the latter. For example, you can run a playbook command from the command mode and automate Ubuntu from the managed node.

This architecture is agentless, meaning you don’t need to install proprietary agents on devices. That requires fewer coding responsibilities, making Ansible a relatively accessible technology for DevOps professionals regardless of their skill set. However, an experienced programmer will need to execute more complicated commands.

Playbooks and modules

Red Hat describes an Ansible Playbook as a “blueprint of automation tasks” and automation tasks as “complex IT actions executed with limited or no human involvement.” Playbooks make up Ansible inventories and are executed on a group, classification, or set of hosts.

You can use Playbooks as templates for automating IT tasks. They contain prewritten code that helps your team program different servers, applications, and other device types without starting from scratch. You can reuse Playbooks as many times as you like to streamline your IT operations.

Ansible modules carry out tasks in your IT departments. These modules include security, communication, user management, cloud management, and networking.

Extensibility and flexibility

You can expand the functionality of Ansible in various ways, for example, by adding custom plugins or modules that execute various IT tasks. Ansible lets you create these plugins and modules from scratch or reuse ones already created. You can share them with your team via a control node.

Where to begin with Ansible in your IT operations

Here are some tips for using Ansible in your IT department:

Install Ansible

Follow the instructions on Ansible’s website and download the software and its many components onto your operating system. This can be a complicated process that might involve installing .pip, locating Python, and upgrading an Ansible installation to the most recently released version.

Determine which tasks you should automate

Think about the IT jobs you want to streamline in your organization. For example, you might want to update systems automatically without human intervention. Once you have decided on which tasks to automate, see whether Ansible has a module that helps you achieve your goal.

Create your first playbook

Start by creating a simple playbook that automates a particular IT task. Then execute that playbook. Do this by running it against the host in your inventory. Both original Ansible and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform have lots of online resources that help you create a playbook and start automating IT jobs.

Takeaway

Ansible is a software tool that streamlines IT operations. You can use it to upgrade systems, deploy systems, install software, and carry out other jobs you don’t have the time or resources for. While Ansible requires a steep learning curve, you will soon familiarize yourself with its workflows and start automating repetitive tasks in your IT department.

Looking Ahead with Event-Driven Ansible

An exciting development in the market is the entrance of a new offering from Red Hat called Event-Driven Ansible. 

As a Red Hat partner, we are working diligently on building a community source that will plug into Event-Driven Ansible to make it easier for our customers to start experimenting with it. To learn more about Event-Driven Ansible check out https://www.ansible.com/use-cases/event-driven-automation. If you would like to learn more about our future work with Event-Driven Ansible or are interested in participating in a beta with us before release, please contact your CSM. Our Ansible integration documentation will be updated with more information when the beta becomes available: https://logicmonitor.com/support/ansible-integration

Further reading: Ansible Terminology: Key terms for getting started

Automation has been a bit of a buzzword in the IT community in the last few years. Companies around the world are looking for ways to scale and automate routine tasks so they can focus on more strategic initiatives. But “automation” is a word that can cover a lot of workflows and can mean something different to every team. 

What do we mean when we talk about automation here at LogicMonitor? 

Generally, I like to divide LogicMonitor’s automation capabilities into a few different buckets: we use it for provisioning, workflow orchestration, and event-driven automation. In this blog, we’ll take a look at what tools we have available at LogicMonitor to support each category and where you can start introducing automation into your environment. 

Resource provisioning with Hashicorp Terraform

The first step in any automation journey is automating infrastructure creation. Usually this is done by adopting a practice known as Infrastructure as Code (IaC). IaC has been around for years. It is a methodology that essentially creates something like a recipe for your infrastructure. IaC helps you set the definitions as a file for whatever you are trying to deploy, making it repeatable, version-able, and shareable. It establishes the file and avoids human error by creating infrastructure exactly the way you want it, when you want it. It is fast, low risk (because it can be peer reviewed), and allows teams to focus on other, more interesting tasks. 

LogicMonitor has native support for two IaC tools out of the box: Redhat Ansible and Hashicorp Terraform. Both of these collections were initially created by our internal team for monitoring our own environment. But now it is, and will continue to be, an open source offering from LogicMonitor at no extra cost to our customers. These collections are now maintained, fully supported, and will continue to be updated by our teams. First, let’s discuss Hashicorp Terraform.

Hashicorp Terraform

LogicMonitor’s Terraform collection is intended to be used during resource provisioning. As folks use Terraform to create their infrastructure, we want to make it easy to add the new resources to LogicMonitor so they are monitored from the beginning. We wanted the experience to be repeatable. For example, if you are a MSP onboarding a new customer, why not use Terraform to replicate the onboarding experience for all of your customers? For enterprises, as teams grow and as your business scales, using Terraform will save you time and money and simplify your team’s ability to monitor resources in LogicMonitor. 

Our Terraform Provider has a strong emphasis on resource and device provisioning, and we are constantly updating it. Last year, we added AWS account onboarding, and we recently started adding support for Azure cloud account onboarding. 

Managing resources with Redhat Ansible

Now that the resources are provisioned, how are you going to manage them? Routine maintenance is a large part of our IT lives, from keeping things up to date at a scheduled maintenance pace, to troubleshooting on the fly to help diagnose common problems.

We use Ansible here at LogicMonitor for a lot of our workflow orchestration work. As maintenance or upgrades happen, why not communicate to your monitoring platform that work is being done? Schedule downtime with LogicMonitor as part of your Ansible playbook using our LogicMonitor Module. Maybe as part of your remediation playbooks you want to modify a collector group or get information from any of your monitored objects. That is all possible with our certified collection. 

Onboarding new customers or setting up a new section of your LogicMonitor environment? We make all of that easy with our Ansible modules, allowing you to create alert rules, escalation chains, and device groups. If you use Ansible in your environment to deploy new infrastructure, our Ansible collection will also give you the opportunity to add these new devices to LogicMonitor for day-one monitoring. 

We are always updating and enhancing these collections. If there is something that you would like to see added to these collections, please reach out and file a feedback ticket. We want to understand how you are using our collections today and how you want to use them in the future! 

Event-driven automation with Stackstorm

This is the most exciting frontier of our automation journey here at LogicMonitor. This type of automation has a few names that you may have heard of: event-driven or alert-driven automation, “if this, then that” (IFTT) automation, or a self-healing enterprise. The fundamental idea behind this type of automation is that an automated action is taken based off of an event that has occurred. In the case of LogicMonitor, it would mean an alert is generated, triggering another action. The alert details are processed following a set of rules, and an automation is triggered to remediate the cause of the alert. 

Imagine the following scenario: You have a windows server that is running out of disk space, and you’re getting alerts about an almost full disk. Traditionally, a tech would see the alert in LogicMonitor (or it would be routed via one of our integrations to a ticketing system), the tech would examine the alert and gather the appropriate information from LogicMonitor (what device is having the issue), VPN into the internal network, and open a remote session with the server. Maybe the tech has a playbook they call to clear common temp files, maybe it is a script, or maybe the tech has to manually do it. The tech finds the files and deletes them, logs out of the system, updating the ticket or worklog, and confirms the alert. In its entirety, this process, though a relatively simple task, takes significant time and resources.

Now imagine the above scenario happened at 1 A.M., routing to an on-call engineer, waking them up. Time is precious, so why not automate these simpler tasks and allow the tech to focus on things that they find interesting or challenging (or let them sleep as low effort, on-call alerts are resolved on their own)?

With event-driven automation, when simple alerts occur, an automation tool processes the alert payload and matches it against a set of rules and triggers that playbook to clear those temp files and resolve the alert. 

Our primary offering into event-driven automation is with Stackstorm, an open source event-driven automation tool that is sponsored by the Linux Foundation. The Stackstorm Exchange allows a level of plug-and-play within your environment to not only receive or act within LogicMonitor but to take action in any other environments you may have. Stackstorm has a very robust engine and can handle any type of workflow, whether a simple task or a complicated upgrade plan. 

Looking ahead with Event-Driven Ansible

Our Ansible and Terraform collections have a lot of overlap to support teams who may prefer one over the other (or teams that use both), and the same is true with event-driven automation. An exciting development in the market is the entrance of a new offering from Red Hat Ansible called Event-Driven Ansible. 

The LogicMonitor team has been working with and experimenting with Event-Driven Ansible when it was released into developer preview late last year. As a Red Hat partner, we are working diligently on building a community source that will plug into Event-Driven Ansible to make it easier for our customers to start experimenting with it. To learn more about Event-Driven Ansible check out https://www.ansible.com/use-cases/event-driven-automation. 

If you would like to learn more about our future work with Event-Driven Ansible or are interested in participating in a beta with us before release, please fill out a form to get started!

G2’s Spring 2023 Reports were announced March 30, 2023, with LogicMonitor grabbing several number-one spots and Leader rankings. This recognition is based on the responses of real users featured in the G2 review form. 

“Rankings on G2 reports are based on data provided to us by real software buyers,” said Sara Rossio, Chief Product Officer at G2. “Potential buyers know they can trust these insights when researching and selecting software because they’re rooted in vetted, verified, and authentic reviews.” 

Our customers have shared their honest feedback about features, capabilities, and implementation, with consistent praise of LogicMonitor’s ease of use, automation, and single pane of glass visibility into hybrid environments. Thanks to our customer reviews, LogicMonitor was able to both maintain and gain new Leader badges. 

Take a look inside the G2 Spring 2023 report highlights below to see how LogicMonitor stacked up: 

Overall Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring Leader: Relationship Index 

The Relationship Index is based on ratings by business professionals, and products are required to receive 10 or more reviews and five responses for each of the relationship-related questions to qualify. 

This quarter, LogicMonitor was ranked #1 in the Relationship Index for Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring, where elements such as the ease of doing business, quality of support, and how likely a customer is to recommend LogicMonitor come into play. 

Overall Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring Leader: Momentum Grid

A product’s Momentum score is calculated by a proprietary algorithm that factors in social, web, employee, and review data that G2 has deemed influential in a company’s momentum, in addition to a minimum of 10 reviews and a year of G2 data to be included in this report. 

LogicMonitor maintained the #1 Leader spot for the Overall Momentum Grid Report for Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring, with above average Satisfaction Ratings. These ratings include:

• 91% of reviewers are likely to recommend LogicMonitor
• 92% of reviewers agree that the product is going in the right direction
• 92% agree that it meets their requirements 

Check out more about LogicMonitor’s Cloud monitoring solutions here. 

Overall Leader for Enterprise Monitoring: Grid Report

Products are ranked by customer satisfaction (based on user reviews) and market presence (based on market share, seller size, and social impact) and placed into four categories on the Grid. 

LogicMonitor maintained a Market Leader position at #2 in the Overall Grid Report for Enterprise Monitoring, in addition to remaining in the #1 Leader spot for the Overall Relationship Index Report for Enterprise Monitoring. New to G2’s Spring 2023 Results Index for Enterprise Monitoring, LogicMonitor gained momentum and moved up to #2 in this category. 

Overall Leader for Network Monitoring: Best Relationship and Usability 

LogicMonitor performed well in the Mid-Market Grid Report for Network Monitoring, similar to the Grid Report for Enterprise Monitoring, and remained in the #1 Leader position. LogicMonitor also maintained Best Relationship and Best Usability Badges, combined with #1 Leader spots for both Mid-Market Relationship Index and Enterprise Usability Index for Network Monitoring. 

Learn more about LogicMonitor’s Infrastructure monitoring capabilities, including the LM Envision platform, here. 

LogicMonitor would like to extend a huge thank you to their innovative and incredible customers for your time and honest feedback that helps the team work better to serve you. 

Learn more about what real users have to say (or leave your own review) on G2’s LogicMonitor review page!

Performance monitoring has become increasingly important for operations teams in today’s rapidly changing digital landscape. The DORA metrics are essential tools used to measure the performance of a DevOps team and ensure that all members work efficiently and collaboratively toward their goals.

Here, we’ll explore what exactly DORA metrics are, how they work, and why companies should be paying attention to them if they want to set up an effective DevOps environment.

What are DORA metrics

DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics are performance indicators used to measure the effectiveness of DevOps processes, tools, and practices. They provide valuable insights into the state of DevOps in an organization, helping teams understand which areas need improvement and where they can optimize their processes.

What are the 4 DORA metrics?

The four main DevOps metrics—Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Mean Time To Resolution, and Change Failure Rate—are crucial performance indicators that you should be tracking to ensure a thriving DevOps environment. Let’s take a closer look at each of these metrics so that you can gain a better understanding of why they are important.

Deployment frequency

Deployment frequency is an essential metric for ITOps teams to monitor and measure. It measures how often code changes are released into production, which can have a dramatic impact on the quality of the end product and user experience. Deployment frequency also helps identify potential issues with development processes that could slow down the release process.

The benefits of increasing deployment frequency include faster delivery of customer value, better uptime, fewer bugs, and more stability in production environments. By increasing deployment frequency, ITOps teams can improve customer satisfaction, lower costs, and speed up time-to-market for new products or features.

Best practices for improving deployment frequency include:

• Automate as much of the deployment process as possible to reduce manual tasks and human errors
• Create a clear release process with defined roles and responsibilities – everyone should understand who is responsible for what to reduce delays in the deployment process
• Develop effective monitoring strategies to quickly detect issues with newly-released code and fix them before they become widespread
• Monitor for any regressions that could occur after a new release – if there are any, roll back the release and take corrective action
• Test early, test often – conduct rigorous testing to make sure that any new code releases are safe and reliable

Lead time for changes

Lead time for changes is a measure of how long it takes between receiving a change request and deploying the change into production. It’s an important metric because it’s related to both customer experience and cost efficiency. If there are long delays between receiving a request and making changes, customers will suffer from poor service or delays and businesses can incur extra costs due to inefficient processes.

To reduce lead time for changes, ITOps teams should focus on improving their processes in several key areas:

• Automation: By automating as many manual tasks as possible, ITOps teams can streamline the process and reduce the amount of time needed to make changes. This includes automation tools such as configuration management systems and infrastructure-as-code solutions.
• Infrastructure provisioning: Provisioning infrastructures can add significant delays to the change process, so it’s important to streamline and optimize this part of your workflow. Look into using tools like containers or serverless solutions to reduce the time needed for infrastructure setup and configuration.
• Monitoring/alerting: Having good monitoring and alerting systems in place can help ITOps teams identify problems quickly and take corrective action faster, reducing lead times for changes. Make sure you have good logging and monitoring practices in place to ensure your team is aware of any issues as soon as they occur.

Mean time to resolution

Mean time to resolution (MTTR) is a measure of the time it takes from initially detecting an incident to successfully restoring customer-facing services back to normal operations. This is a measurement of the overall effectiveness of an organization’s Incident Response and Problem Resolution Process. For IT operations teams, MTTR is an important metric that can provide insight into how efficiently they can identify and fix problems as soon as possible.

MTTR serves as a direct indicator of customer satisfaction, since customers will be more likely to remain loyal if their issues are addressed quickly. Additionally, too much downtime can result in lost revenue opportunities from the inability to sell or deliver products or services.

There are several best practices that teams can employ to reduce the amount of time it takes to restore service after an incident. These include having an established Incident Response plan, setting up automated triggers and notifications, assigning a single point of contact responsible for managing incidents, and training team members on incident response processes. 

Change failure rate

Change failure rate (CFR) is a measure of how often changes to a system cause problems. It is calculated as the number of issues divided by the total number of changes attempted in a given period.

Understanding change success rates helps organizations understand where resources and efforts should be focused for improvement. High success rates indicate that processes and procedures around making changes to the system are working well. Low success rates indicate areas for process improvement or increased training on specific technologies.

Organizations can track their CFR over time and compare it against benchmarks from other organizations in the same industry. This helps identify areas where their change processes can be improved. It also provides insight into potential causes of failure, such as a lack of resources or training for personnel involved in making changes to the system.

The DORA metrics are essential for the success of ops teams, and it’s important to keep them healthy. With understanding what each metric means, you can use it as a guide on how your team is performing and identify areas that need to be improved. While there are many methods for refining your system efficiency or finding better solutions, gaining insight from these four metrics gives you a structural approach and clear view of optimization.

Importance of DORA metrics for ITOps teams

DORA metrics are key performance indicators that help ITOps teams measure the effectiveness of their processes. These metrics are considered essential to successful DevOps initiatives because they provide valuable insight into how well an organization is succeeding in its digital transformation efforts.

By using these metrics, ITOps teams gain insight into where their processes need improvement, allowing them to focus their efforts on specific areas. The ability to monitor progress towards goals, identify opportunities for improvement, and optimize existing processes is essential for successful DevOps initiatives. Ultimately, the use of DORA metrics by ITOps teams helps them become more efficient and effective at delivering value to customers.

Importance of monitoring and improving these metrics

The importance of monitoring and improving DORA metrics cannot be overstated. Since the introduction of DevOps, organizations have been striving to improve development cycles, reduce risk, and deliver deployments with higher speed, reliability, and quality. As a result, software delivery has become an increasingly important factor in driving organizational success.

These metrics allow teams to track how quickly they’re releasing code changes into production environments, how long it takes from code commit to deployment, how often those changes fail, and finally, how quickly the team responds when a deployment fails.

Increasingly, organizations are investing in proactive monitoring and alerting tools to monitor their DORA metrics on an ongoing basis. These tools can provide quick visualizations of performance trends across the four key metrics, enabling teams to spot opportunities for improvement earlier and make better decisions about optimizing their processes.

In addition, certain types of tooling can help automate a number of tasks associated with managing and optimizing DORA metrics. For example, automated deployments simplify the process of deploying code into production environments, reducing cycle time by eliminating manual steps from the process. Test automation helps reduce failure rates, and automatic rollbacks enable teams to quickly restore services in the event of a failure.

The IT services industry has continued to grow in the backdrop of high demand for innovative solutions across all industries. Global spending surpassed $1.3 trillion in 2022. Managed services account for much of this spending with managed service providers (MSP) at the heart of the impressive growth.

MSPs make up the largest part of the IT service industry, delivering an extensive host of IT solutions from data storage, Networks and Infrastructure, security, Software as a Service (SaaS), communication services, support, and other essential business solutions. But in today’s fast-paced business environment, client demands change rapidly and MSPs have to adapt quickly to these changing market needs.

MSPs struggle to offer multiple IT Services, and this causes challenges in meeting clientele’s requirements. To overcome this challenge, IT service providers now heavily rely on Remote Monitoring Management (RMM) tools. With RMM, MSPs seamlessly manage clients’ needs remotely and resolve any issues.

While RMM solutions can ease most of the challenges in your MSP, they come with multiple challenges. If you want to move to the next level of IT service management, optimize your systems to overcome myriad challenges with RMM solutions such as inability to scale, weak automation protocol, weak reporting, and complexity of the technology. This post explores how you can leverage unique solutions to go beyond RMM and towards IT service management (ITSM).

How MSPs Are Currently Using RMM

As a managed service provider (MSP), you have a daunting task on your hands to meet diverse clientele needs. Your clientele probably spans multiple industries across different time zones. With a clientele base this wide, you would have to devote a lot of resources to guarantee reliable service delivery. 

The traditional break-fix model that MSPs relied on no longer works. You can’t have someone physically visiting your clients’ offices to sort out technical hitches. This is where a dedicated Remote Monitoring Management (RMM) tool. RMM software is integral to network management and asset monitoring by MSPs. Your team gets tools that allow visibility over connected endpoints (client’s devices/networks). With RMM solutions, you can effectively monitor everything that happens on your managed networks and consider the action to improve network performance.

A dedicated Remote Monitoring Management (RMM) tool helps your company standardize connected IT assets and ensure optimal performance. Your IT experts can remotely check on the connected IT assets and evaluate their performance against the standards.

Two of the biggest complaints against MSPs have always been poor response time and downtime. With the best RMM solutions, your IT professionals can now monitor systems, track issues, allocate tasks, and automate maintenance jobs. With this efficient technology, you have all assets under your watch in your control. You gain insight into how your managed networks and assets perform, and carry out maintenance work remotely. 

For managed IT service providers, RMM software is a godsend in improving the customer experience. It’s easier to maintain the best SLA levels through ongoing remote maintenance of managed networks. More importantly, MSPs can meet the stringent compliance standards in the industry through improved network performance, remote monitoring, and network security.

With the agents installed on the client’s system, your MSP has real-time data on which to base its decision. Reporting and analytics are two of the major benefits of leveraging RMM solutions.  Ultimately, the constant stream of data helps to:

• Reduce downtime: You can foresee emerging problems and resolve them remotely, which improves customer satisfaction levels.
• Respond faster: With real-time monitoring, any issue that emerges on a clients’ website receives immediate attention for resolution.
• Leverage automation benefits: You can automate updates, maintenance works, and other tasks under the managed service agreement, such as creating system restore points, deleting temporary files or internet history, device reboot/shutdown, disk check, and running scripts.
• Enhance productivity: Your team also has more time on its hands to improve your services now that RMM continuously monitors the client’s systems. This boosts productivity levels in your company.
• Reduce costs: Your MSP enjoys the cost-cutting benefits that come with remote management of clients’ systems. Your IT experts can resolve issues remotely without leaving the office.

How MSPs Are Currently Using ITSM

With IT service management (ITSM), an organization can leverage the complete range of benefits from information technology. This is a popular concept in managed IT services, with the principal goal being to deliver maximum value to the IT services consumer. 

The key players in ITSM are the MSP, end users (employees and customers using), and IT services offered by the MSP (from applications, hardware, and infrastructure), quality factors, and the costs. Managed services providers (MSPs) work with clients to deliver a host of IT solutions to meet the needs of such clients through a mix of IT solutions, people, and processes.

Unfortunately, MSPs still consider ITSM basic IT support, which means these service providers don’t harness the full potential of this IT concept. If you embrace ITSM in your organization, you have your IT teams overseeing all IT assets from laptops and servers to software applications.

ITSM doesn’t just focus on the final delivery of the IT services but spans the life-cycle of an IT service. An MSP works with the client from the conceptualization of the strategy, design, transition up to the launch/live operation of the service and maintenance. 

Why Should MSPs Focus On Moving Past RMM to ITSM?

Unlike RMM, ITSM goes beyond detecting and resolving day-to-day issues on a client’s system. As an MSP, your IT team is integral in service delivery and handles end-to-end management of these IT services. You can leverage different ITSM tools to manage such services effectively. 

While most MSPs are comfortable using RMM for enhanced service delivery, ITMS can make life easier for your IT team with structured delivery and documentation. If you implement ITSM for your managed services company, you streamline operations and save on costs with predictable operations.

Another way MSPs are leveraging ITSM is in decision-making. One of the most challenging roles of an IT manager is to make decisions on the fly. Implementing ITSM gives the team actionable IT insights into your operations. You have more control over your organization which helps in better decision making. 

There’s a need for the next-gen MSP to move from RMM to ITSM. Some benefits for this shift include:

• Efficiency and productivity gains with defined roles and responsibilities.
• Benefits that come with a structured approach to service management.
• Aligning IT with your MSP’s business objectives/priorities.
• Helping to standardize service delivery.
• Help MSP set and meet realistic expectations for service.
• Facilitating cross-department collaboration.
• Faster response to major IT incidences.
• Building an empowered IT team.
• Improved service delivery.
• Reduced IT costs.
• Reduced regulatory and security risks.
• Increased profitability.
• Higher customer satisfaction.
• Reduced incident life cycles.
• Improved compliance and reduce risk through compliance in IT service design, delivery, and management.
• Reduced downtime because of more efficient alerting with ITSM.

How To Improve ITSM

For a managed services provider, ITSM is essential in the highly competitive industry. You can leverage the best ITSM tools to improve productivity, deliver higher quality services, and much more. For this reason, continuously improve your ITSM strategy. 

Below are some ideas you can integrate into your system for better IT service management:

• Setting clear and achievable short and long-term goals: Use the SMART model (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) when you come up with goals to make it easier to assess progress 
• Assess the current situation and needs/ITSM maturity level: Don’t implement any changes for the sake of it but carry out an audit to identify weaknesses you can eliminate. This ensures you invest in appropriate ITSM solutions.
• Establish clear KPIs: The KPIs and metrics help you track the ITMS performance. They include the number of incidents, customer satisfaction score (CSAT), first contact resolution (FCR) rate, average incident resolution time, and the number of service requests.
• Strategize on winning upper management support: Executive agreement eases the update of your MSP’s ITSM capabilities.
• Consider the options to implement ITSM changes: Brainstorm with the team to identify the best techniques to update your ITSM operations. ITIL is one of the trusted frameworks for ITSM best practices, but you can look at alternatives. Make sure you bring everyone on board through training before you implement any changes to ITSM.
• Automation: In today’s fast-paced business environment, automation comes handy if you wish to improve ITSM in your MSP. With the right automation tools, you boost efficiency and help cut costs of any ITSM changes. Automation also reduces the risk of errors, improved predictability, productivity, and reliability, while enhancing customer experience.
• Choose the right ITSM software: To get the most of ITSM, choose the right software to suit your company. Go for a single ITSM software that helps manage everything from one place. 
• Incremental changes: Any changes to ITSM require time and a continual service improvement (CSI) approach. Track and measure the progress as you implement the changes to avoid disruptive action that might ruin customer satisfaction.

How To Reduce Costs With ITSM

One of the main advantages of the ITSM platform is the reduction of IT costs. Most businesses that would like to harness the immense benefits of IT solutions can’t because of the associated high costs. With ITSM, organizations can now take their operations to another level by integrating a whole range of IT solutions.

With the competitive nature of the IT industry, MSPs have to identify innovative solutions to cut costs. ITSM helps in cost reduction through higher employee productivity, streamlined business processes, and reduced cost of IT systems.

Some tactics that can help reduce costs with ITSM include:

• Shifting to the cloud: This saves on capital expenditures for equipment such as servers and network equipment. You only pay monthly operating expenses.
• Implementing agile practices: MSPs have to move from the traditional organizational structure and embrace agile collaborative practices. The shift to agile can cut costs through faster fixes and reduced failure rates.
• Automation: Automated managed IT solutions guarantee better service delivery and cut costs on repetitive tasks. From job scheduling to clients’ system monitoring, automated IT service management can help cut costs of operations.
• Use of contractors: Your company can streamline its ITSM platform by recruiting external contractors for service delivery when you need specific tasks done.
• Optimization: By optimizing your ITSM system to reduce downtime, which can eat into your bottom line.

Automating With ITSM To Save Time

MSPs face an enormous challenge in service delivery, and this is where ITSM automation comes in handy. By automating business processes, you improve service delivery, cut costs and more importantly, save time. Time is an invaluable asset in the IT service industry and can make or break your organization.

Automating with ITSM streamlines repetitive tasks from your operations and eliminates redundancy. Automating these functions also enhances the quality of service and boosts the customer experience. 

You can also make faster transitions in your business in case of changes when you automate ITSM functions. Other benefits include:

• Easier employee onboarding.
• Automated workflows.
• Faster system updates.
• Automated ticketing for faster resolution of issues by the IT desk. 

Automation enables organizations to streamline IT processes, reduce costs, and improve service delivery. By automating routine tasks such as software updates, patching, and backup, IT teams can focus on higher-value activities that require more specialized skills.

Automation can also help to reduce errors and improve consistency, which can increase efficiency and reduce downtime. In addition, automation can provide real-time monitoring and analytics that enable IT teams to proactively identify and address issues before they become critical.

Use ITSM to elevate customer service

ITSM helps MSPs deliver better customer service in several ways:

1. Clear service level agreements (SLAs): ITSM involves establishing clear SLAs with clients that specify the level of service they can expect. This can help to manage client expectations and ensure that MSPs are delivering services that meet or exceed those expectations. SLAs can cover response times, uptime guarantees, and other metrics that are important to clients.
2. Proactive service management: ITSM is designed to be proactive, rather than reactive. By proactively monitoring IT infrastructure and identifying potential issues before they become critical, MSPs can prevent service disruptions and minimize downtime. This helps to ensure that clients are always able to access the IT services they need.
3. Consistent service delivery: Consistency is key with ITSM, which creates a standardized model for service delivery. This helps to ensure that all clients receive the same level of service, regardless of their size or complexity. Consistent service delivery makes the difference in trust building with clients and improving overall experience. Big or small, everyone wants to feel that expert attention to detail
4. Communication and reporting: This can include regular performance reports, incident notifications, and other updates as defined by each customer. Effective communication and reporting can help to build trust and confidence with clients, demonstrating that MSPs are actively managing their IT services.
5. Continuous service improvement: ITSM involves a continuous improvement mindset, where MSPs are always looking for ways to improve their services. This can include gathering client feedback, monitoring performance metrics, and implementing process improvements. By continuously improving their services, MSPs can stay ahead of the curve and deliver even better service to their clients over time.

By establishing clear SLAs, being proactive, delivering consistent service, communicating effectively, and continuously improving services, MSPs can differentiate themselves in a competitive market and build long-term client relationships based on trust and reliability.

Advanced Security With ITSM Function 

ITSM promotes collaboration between IT and security systems. When these two components work together, there’s improved security through automatized alerts, identifying potential risks, faster resolution of security threats. All these give your clients peace of mind.
The IT service industry is volatile and fast-paced, with innovations and solutions emerging every day. To survive in such a turbulent business landscape, your managed services company must adapt fast and embrace the latest solutions. While RMM solutions have served MSPs for a long time, the next-gen MSP has to embrace IT service management (ITSM) solutions to survive. ITSM guarantees better service delivery, reliability, higher productivity, advanced security, cost reduction, and other benefits that give your MSP a competitive edge.

Originally published June 10, 2021. Updated March 2023.

Relational database or non-relational database: which should you use for your projects? It’s a common question. When choosing the database type that’s right for your requirements, it’s important to understand the differences between the two.

Both database types are practical in different situations and use cases and have commonalities. Both are also widely implemented, with a number of different provider options available for businesses and developers that need to store, access, or analyze data. Below, you’ll find the necessary information you need to make an informed decision about choosing the right database for your data management needs.

What is a relational database?

All databases need the following features:

•          Capability to store multiple types – ideally all types – of data
•          Easy, fast access to the data stored within the database
•          Usefulness: does the data stored provide strategic business advantages or insights?

In other words, a database that only stores partial, inaccessible, or useless data is pointless. Business databases must be able to store and provide access to both operational and analytical data to maximize their usefulness.

Operational data means data that helps run the business’s daily operations, such as sales, stock levels, or HR information. Analytical data is usually data related to customer or client engagement with the business’s products or services. This could include information on blog traffic, product trends, or predictions based on customer buying behavior. Data is stored in its raw form in data warehouses or data lakes and becomes accessible and actionable when transferred into databases.

A relational database management system, or RDBMS, is one method for storing and providing access to this wealth of digital data. RDBMSs store data in tables. These tables often have similar information, causing relationships to form between the tables — hence the name relational database. Each table has both rows and columns, as you might expect. The data is stored in rows, and the columns define what this data is. One column has unique defining information and is called the primary key. When that key is used in another table, it’s called the foreign key, and a relationship forms between the tables.

Relational database developers and managers typically use Structured Query Language (SQL) to perform, create, read, update or delete (CRUD) operations. 

Relational databases are far more suited to operational data, as some analytical data may arrive in an unstructured format unsuitable for storage in tables.

Relational database advantages

Relational databases help protect against duplicate information. The use of primary and foreign keys builds relationships that ensure data accuracy.

Reducing duplication or replication of data reduces storage costs and should reduce the resources required to run the database.

RDBMS databases are well-established, meaning there’s plenty of support available for anyone wanting to design or use a relational database.

Relational databases are ACID compliant. ACID stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability. This is a standard by which the reliability of database transactions is measured. For example, a bad query or change request should not corrupt other data within the database; the data should be stable and unaffected by failed transactions.

Relational database disadvantages

Relational databases are not particularly scalable. As the data your business ingests grows, you may struggle to grow your database alongside the larger volumes of data you have to handle. Considering that Statista predicts the world will produce 181 zettabytes of data by 2025, a lack of scalability could become a genuine limitation for businesses that want to remain agile as they grow.

Relational databases also lack flexibility. By definition, relational databases follow a rigid scheme based solely on columns and tables. This provides both advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately, it means that once the database has been created around your desired design, there’s no way to make changes later without taking the database offline and adjusting all the data to match the new criteria.

As a relational database grows, its performance slows. This means highly complex databases with numerous tables can take a long time to perform queries, slowing down the rate of useful business insights.

What is a non-relational database?

Non-relational databases are any database type that doesn’t use a relational database’s structured, relationship-focused data management style. Non-relational databases are not limited to tables, columns, and rows. This means they can handle unstructured data that doesn’t follow any particular schema. Unstructured data may include replies to automated email campaigns or text messages. There are no set parameters for this data, and often businesses will need to use business intelligence (BI) tools to sift through this unstructured data, seeking out patterns that can lead to business-critical insights and forecasts.

A table with set definitions about how data should appear and be presented is of no use for unstructured data. A non-relational database provides an alternative that supports data that follows no fixed schema.

There are multiple types of non-relational databases, but here are the pros and cons of the overall concept.

Non-relational database advantages

Non-relational databases are better suited to the cloud environment. This type of database can deal with many types of data, including data from devices across the Internet of Things (IoT) and a multitude of SaaS and apps. This allows developers to manage vastly disparate systems or applications with ease.

Scalability becomes much simpler with a non-relational database. This method of storing data is ideally suited for larger volumes of data and not limited by data type.

Because non-relational databases can handle larger and more complex forms of data, they perform better, faster, and provide more real-time insights for businesses when combined with appropriate BI tools or expert data managers.

Non-relational database disadvantages

Reliability is not as guaranteed with a non-relational database. There may be instances when adjusting data causes problems with other entries. To prevent this, developers may want to custom-code their own contingencies, making non-relational database creation slightly more complex.

An essential point concerning non-relational databases is that they’re not ACID compliant.

Finally, there is less support available for non-relational databases simply because they haven’t been around as long. The developer community is still growing, so it may seem like a tougher job to create, run, and maintain this type of database.

What are the biggest differences?

Scalability: While you can always add more rows of data to a relational database — making it vertically scalable — the more columns or tables you add, the worse it performs. Non-relational databases can be far more complex with a much lower impact on performance.

Reliability: Relational databases comply with industry standards of reliability (ACID). Non-relational databases have no such guarantees, prompting programmers to develop their own code to provide reliability.

The biggest difference between relational and non-relational databases is the way data is structured. Data in relational databases must always match the predefined structure of the column in the table. For example, you couldn’t put someone’s name in a telephone number column. The table wouldn’t accept it.

Conversely, non-relational databases fetch and present data in a multitude of ways. Let’s explore that more in the next section.

Architecture for relational databases and non-relational databases

Relational databases contain data, metadata (data about the data), plus a compiler to convert SQL queries so the database can understand the query and provide the required information. Data is always structured in tables built from columns and rows.

In a typical RDBMS architecture, queries may come from the database administrator, a data analyst, or an application programmer.

Queries may travel through a query compiler or an application program compiler. The RDBSM will have query optimizers that convert the query and run it through the RDBMS runtime system. This part of the database executes the queries or commands from other apps and fetches data accordingly.

There will also be a log that records what queries have taken place and any issues such as transaction failures or system shutdowns. This allows data managers to understand how the database is being used and address any reliability issues.

Finally, a typical RDBSM will have a recovery manager built in to ensure reliability after a failure.

Non-relational database architecture varies as there are several types. This is why they’re also called NoSQL databases, where NoSQL means Not Only SQL — or not only fixed schema and criteria.

The most basic NoSQL database is the key-value database. Data keys are paired with data values — the entries within the database. Each data value can only be accessed with a specific key that relates to that data point. This allows fast access to data, but limits the complexity of data that can be stored.

Wide-column databases are essentially a more flexible version of a relational database. They also follow the standard table with columns and rows format. Unlike relational database structure, however, each column can hold a different type of data. They can store all kinds of data, but it can slow them down when it’s time to fetch it.

Document databases are possibly the most flexible database architecture. Data is stored as JSON-like documents that can handle multiple types of data. Strings, numbers, arrays, and nested documents can all live in a document database. A single document in this type of database could hold all of a customer’s data, making it simple and fast to retrieve that information. Query APIs can fetch this data, detailing what criteria the data should be filtered by and what fields the data analyst needs to see once the data is retrieved.

Data in a document database is highly organized, easy to view, and available. There’s no reason you can’t view the same data across multiple servers, which helps break down or even prevent data silos within organizations, and makes app development far more agile.

Which type of database is MongoDB/NoSQL?

MongoDB is a cloud-based database-as-a-service designed to connect to other cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and other services used by businesses. There’s a high focus on data security, object-based development, and workload isolation. But is MongoDB relational or non-relational?

MongoDB is a non-relational database that’s highly scalable. It’s designed for enterprises that need to store huge volumes of data, which is easier with non-relational database architecture. MongoDB is a NoSQL database, because data is not solely stored or fetched in tables. Specifically, MongoDB is a document database that enables enterprises to store virtually unlimited forms of data.

Relational database vs. non-relational database: What type of database should I use?

Making an informed decision about the type of database to use means understanding the key differences.

In brief, both types of databases are suitable for cloud-native apps, yet both have advantages and disadvantages. Relational databases are more widely implemented and meet ACID compliance standards. However, non-relational databases are more suitable for large volumes of unstructured data, which are becoming more commonplace as the amount of data ingested by businesses grows exponentially.

Set out your goals for your database, consider your business requirements for the relevant data, and choose the type of database to use based on those needs.Whatever database you use, talk to LogicMonitor about the best ways to achieve comprehensive database monitoring and maximize the effectiveness and security of your data alongside your existing IT infrastructure.