Is your team ready for 2017? Featuring early release findings from BigPanda’s forthcoming State of Monitoring Report, our latest e-book takes a look at how key industry trends will affect IT operations in the upcoming year.

Given that the very development of Icinga arose from the need for additional functionalities in open source monitoring, it’s little surprise that the tool has become indispensable for so many IT professionals. Its configurability and flexibility allow for a sophisticated approach to monitoring, which is both scalable and extensible to large, complex environments.

As a TechOps community, we’re awash in buzz words. Most are initially used to establish geek credibility yet quickly become cliches. Take, for example, the term “DevOps”. From its inception as a Twitter hashtag used to promote a meetup in bucolic Ghent, Belgium in 2009, it began to be co-opted months later by ops teams around the world aspiring to manage infrastructure with code.

It was a whirlwind couple of days, but FutureStack15 is in the books! I’m sure I speak for most of the BigPanda team when I say that a weekend of rest was welcomed after the long (but exciting!) days at the show. Between demos, conversations with clients and prospects, and even a surprise visit from Weird Al – there was hardly a moment of downtime. But in our world, who likes downtime? (Excuse the terrible pun).

In case you missed it, here’s a recap of some of the key themes discussed at the show:

If you work in tech, you’ve probably heard of the Pareto principle, or, as it’s more commonly called, the 80/20 rule. According to the 80/20 rule, for many events, 80 percent of the results are generated by 20 percent of the inputs.

A little background: back in the late 1800s the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noticed that approximately 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. Not long after, Pareto also observed that 20 percent of the peapods in his garden generated 80 of the crop’s yield – and thus the 80/20 principle was born. 

We’re adjusting to the new reality that DevOps is a compelling layover on the journey between legacy ops and self-healing infrastructure. Eliminating the cultural gap between developers and operations, the now-cliched state of IT nirvana called “DevOps”, is by no means the end goal. The goal is reliable system performance and availability without human intervention - the panacea called “NoOps”.

Today, I'm happy to announce that BigPanda has raised $16 million in Series B funding.  Battery Ventures led the round, with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Mayfield.  We are thrilled to call them all partners. If you're into press releases, you can check it out here

We’re proud to be unveiling a new concept we pioneered in the den that finally moves beyond dashboards as eye candy to a new place where IT analytics can be used to make better ops decisions. It’s called Service Health Analytics and it exposes all data from all monitoring sources in the form of configurable dashboards that can be customized, saved, and shared.

Tsunami detection. Crop dusting. Biohazard monitoring. What may sound like innuendos in the next EL James novel are also fields being revolutionized by quant jocks and smart algorithms. And yet, despite all the innovation, we technorati continue to bastardize the terms “data science”, “machine learning,” and “big data”. They’ve become lazy speak for “we’re not sure what we’re doing so we’ll hand wave cliches until we have real technology and a business model."

Rishi is too humble to be the CIO of a Fortune 100 bank, too busy to be the father of four, too accomplished to blog about ice cream, and too educated to love John Gray. Mostly, he's too unpredictable to fit stereotypes and too passionate about everything he does to do anything at less than full throttle.

I met Rishi this week at the Pacific Crest Global Technology Leadership Forum in Vail where he was presenting and I was lucky to be in the audience. We spent an hour together before his talk that inspired me to rescue Nepalese orphans... and eat more ice cream.

Rishi's been an IT leader since before we called it that. He has helped organizations grow and shrink and grow again. He's more scared about the state of IT today than he has ever been.

Here are excerpts from the discussion...

What is MTTR? Don’t answer with what it stands for or how you use it. The question is more philosophical than literal. For too long we’ve measured operational performance based on the number of minutes it takes to resolve an incident. The almighty trend line slopes down then we gulp milk from the jug of IT inflated ego like NASCAR drivers drunk on Nagios exhaust fumes.

Like the Zen riddle about one hand clapping it’s important to first ask:

1. What’s an incident?
2. What does it mean to resolve one? …and (the ever-blasphemous)
3. Is it unequivocally better to resolve them quickly?

My answers...

In 1792, the New York Stock Exchange opened its doors on Wall Street with five stocks available for trade. Today, more than 2,800 companies list on the NYSE with a combined market value of more than $15 trillion. In 223 years, everything except the name has changed.