Velocity NYC kicks off this week – and our team is in the Big Apple to conduct demos, answer all your burning questions, and yes, hand out some of our cute panda swag. If past events are anything to go by, our adorable panda tees have proven to be quite a hit, so be sure to stop by booth 501 bright and early to get yours! While you’re there, say hello to the friendly panda crew – and check out all the latest and greatest from our powerful alert correlation platform, including:

Decompressing from an exhausting, inspirational few days at Knowledge16, the annual ServiceNow event...

From humble beginnings (my first Knowledge was a few hundred attendees in a tent in San Diego), Knowledge has become a global tour de force. This year, Mandalay Bay could barely contain more than 11,000 customers and partners (and the expo hall could barely contain more than 100 decibels of the tech equivalent of Queensryche). Getting into the keynote felt like rush hour on the subway in midtown Manhattan. 

Salesforce likely lost quite a bit of money last Tuesday. IDC estimates that the typical infrastructure failure costs organizations $100,000 per hour, while a critical application failure costs as much as $500,000 to $1 million per hour. Salesforce was down for over 20 hours and still continued to have service disruptions. This in turn translated to heavy financial loss for Salesforce customers worldwide, as they struggled to manage their lifeblood processes that depend on the SaaS giant. The Salesforce reputation struggled and the CEO, Marc Benioff, meted out public apologies on social channels.

We’re more dependent than ever on cloud infrastructure. At work. At home. At play. But what happens when the cloud fails? Ask the more than 75 million Netflix subscribers or more than 100,000 companies that rely on Salesforce.com. They’ll tell you cloud failures are costly and painful.

Cloud-based apps and services must be available all the time… and yet they aren’t. DevOps and NOC teams responsible for maintaining their health must resolve issues immediately… and yet they can’t. On this MonitoringScape Live episode hear from the experts why cloud monitoring is critical, why it’s hard, and what organizations are doing to help all of us live cloudier, better lives.

ITSM is evolving thanks to new capabilities that make it easy to visualize service health based on real-time CMDB updates fed via automated change management driven by smarter monitoring infrastructure. We’re nearing a time where machines will manage machines. At BigPanda, we’re doing our part to get there quickly.

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.

Today we announced an integration with the excellent cloud monitoring system Librato which was recently acquired by SolarWinds. We’ve enjoyed working with the Librato team to bring the product to market and now are eagerly awaiting feedback from the loud and proud community of BigPanda+Librato users.

Last week, Google announced several changes to its cloud platform. First, AppScale, the company that provides an open source implementation of Google’s application platform, Google App Engine, is receiving a direct investment from Google in order to accelerate the interoperability between AppScale and Google App Engine. This is a smart move, and it should help developers overcome the app portability issue that is ushering in a new era of vendor-lock within public clouds.