Work in IT for long enough and you’ll eventually end up with monitoring notification overload. Once you move into a DevOps or Managed Services environment, the level of level of notifications to deal with can bog down or tie up your entire team. Each of us deal with this overload in our own way. Some create unique email addresses and have all notifications sent there. Some have them sent to their own email and filter them out. Others will even delegate them to a junior colleague and wash their hands of them. Regardless of how you choose to handle the flood of daily notifications, it’s far too easy for the really important business-breaking ones to get lost in the haze. This is where BigPanda comes in. Turn That Cloud Upside Down A cloud-based service that purports to be able to help you cut through the noise, BigPanda integrates with the monitoring tools that you already have. Using data science to help automate and scale the incident management process, BigPanda is designed to be smart enough to create a baseline for your environment and let you know when something happens that isn’t part of that regular baseline. BigPanda aggregates alerts from all your monitoring systems and normalizes them into one consistent data model. It then leverages powerful algorithms to automate the slow and non-scalable tasks of the incident management process. BigPanda intelligently groups alerts into incidents based on host, cluster and application or even by custom tags that you specify yourself. It then correlates incidents with code deployments and infrastructure changes that may have caused them. By helping to teams to detect root causes faster and easier than ever before it can help to mitigate or even eliminate software upgrade nightmares. I took a quick...

Knowledge is power, and Quaddra Software aims to empower customers by giving them knowledge of their unstructured storage. Quaddra was founded by storage and computer science experts Rupak Majumdar, Jeffrey Fischer, and John Howarth, and their first product, Storage Insight, breaks new ground in the storage management and analytics market. So what is Storage Insight and how does it differ from other market offerings? First and foremost Storage Insight isn’t a cloud storage solution or a cloud storage gateway. It is high performance, highly-scalable file analytics software designed to give storage and systems administrators the information they need to manage unstructured data files. As you can see from figure 1 above, by providing your teams with the information they need, Storage Insight can reduce the time and money involved in making decisions about your storage assets. One of the ways that Storage Insight does this is by providing a clear and concise breakdown of the files in your existing unstructured storage. Storage Insight can assist your team in eliminating cold files from your expensive ‘hot’ storage. The category and filetype breakdowns also help you quickly and easily identify inappropriate use of storage assets. So how does Storage Insight work? Unlike traditional storage management, analytics and archival products, Storage Insight doesn’t need to ingest your data to work with it. Instead it comes as a VMware + Ubuntu virtual appliance that integrates into your current environment. Storage Insight has pre-built modules that allow it to work with standard file storage architectures like NFS and CIFS, and has the ability to add plug-in modules for other types of storage if it isn’t one of the standard architectures. Even better though, Storage Insight doesn’t just integrate with physical, hardware-based storage. In a first for storage management and...