While significant progress has been made in leveraging analytics for better operational insights, today’s IT operations analytics solutions still operate in silos. To really reap the benefits and promise of analytics, IT decision-makers need to break these silos and apply an approach that combines many different major sources of information: blended analytics.

When the number of employees, products, and releases you’re managing grows rapidly, that transformation introduces several challenges—and opportunities—in almost every aspect of configuration management. This article presents the major issues a company may face and the improvements you can make to processes and tools as a result.

With SOA, the services you consume are typically developed by your organization or a close business partner, so you can assume they have standards similar to your own. But when you adopt APIs, you usually have no visibility into how solidly the services were built—or when and how they are evolving. How should you properly vet an external API?

The first keynote of the Agile Development, Better Software & DevOps Conference West was Why DevOps Changes Everything, by Jeffery Payne. There are definitely tools and processes that can help streamline a DevOps shift, but Jeff said that fundamentally, building a culture where everybody can communicate and collaborate effectively is key.