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ITRS Group customers; and CloudOur customers are continuing to move workloads from traditional on-premise data centres to cloud platforms, orchestrated container environments (e.g. Kubernetes or Openshift) or both.  In our previous newsletter we talked about work we have done to support these environments – running in the cloud, getting data from cloud platforms, running in orchestrated environments, and capturing data from inside applications.In this newsletter we are focussed on one additional aspect of these environments: cost.

The popularity of cloud technology has risen rapidly, surging from a small back-office concern to an integral part of business strategy. This demand is showing no signs of stopping with the public cloud market set to exceed $330bn in 2022. And while companies continue to rush towards this technology, few have worked out how to use it efficiently, as 35% of cloud spend remains unused and wasted, the equivalent of $80bn.

Welcome to the second ITRS newsletter of 2020. This quarter has been unusual for all of us. Most of the workforce is now working from home, placing increased demand on IT estate monitoring on two fronts. First, an increased dependence on technology, particularly off-premise technology, has created unprecedented levels of traffic, straining IT capacity. Second, the shift in working hours, with many now working earlier in the morning or into the night, means services must be up-and-running 24/7 and cannot abide downtime outside of the regular 9 to 5.

Messaging tools become critical apps for FSFinancial Services companies, and especially the Capital Markets area, have long had a suite of critical tools – payments systems, trading platforms, market data etc.  Now, with the advent of mass home working to address the COVID-19 crisis, a new category of critical apps has emerged – the humble messaging system.

Many people don’t know this, but the first implementation of the StatsD daemon came from Etsy about 10 years ago. It was written specifically to collect metrics from instrumented code on the e-commerce platform, and this first version was written in Node.js. Over the years StatsD has become very popular and it is now the industry standard for opensource inside-the- app monitoring.

Michael Roberts Capacity Manager at CDL Limited, Verified by IT Central Station What is our primary use case?The primary use case is to assist me in my role as capacity manager. It assists in capacity planning across our company. We use it to ensure that we've got enough capacity to meet future demand from the business perspective: new customers come on board and existing customers are growing.

MiniGeneosMiniGeneos is a brand new utility for Geneos, which serves a number of purposes:Enable a developer to validate their in-app monitoring without needing to know how to configure GeneosRun a mini version of Gateway Hub as a PoC in order to see its benefitsQuickly demo the Geneos stackIt includes a Gateway, a Netprobe and a slim version of Gateway Hub, packaged into a single docker container. Although it is an excellent tool for these purposes, it is not supported for production use for a few reasons:

 In our ‘new world’ the current market can change in a matter of seconds. And far from being the exception, the global financial markets lead the pack in terms of their minute-by-minute reactions to breaking news. Rapidly closing borders and individual announcements like the recent lockdown in London are triggering violent spikes in volatility as businesses grind to a halt and stockbrokers panic.