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...

System Mechanic will always hold a special place in my heart. I was introduced to it as a technician new to performing services for consumers. We used it to automatically perform all of the tests I’d previously done  manually. It was a godsend to me then, but I must admit that I haven’t actually used it for a while. Let’s take a tour of the facilities and see what we’ve got to work with shall we?   Features, Error Correction and CRUDD System Mechanic purports to offer more than 50 proven tools and functions utilising patented technology, and it can fix and/or prevent over 27000 PC problems and errors. That’s a lot of features and it’s certainly a lot of possible errors. How do we find and fix those errors? If you guessed with a system scan then yes indeed, you’d be absolutely correct. Opening up System Mechanic we’re presented with the Dashboard Overview. If you look closely you’ll see that it wants to analyse the system to find issues and there are two ways to do that. If we click on “analyse now” then it will automatically run a quick analysis. Clicking the drop down arrow will give us the option of running a deep scan. There’s a very real time difference involved in the two scans though. A quick analysis should take 1-2 minutes, and a deep analysis should take 5-7 minutes. You could run a scan and follow up on its recommendations straight away, but as we’re on tour, let’s have a look at some of the other features before we dive into that. Next up on our whirlwind tour of the System Mechanic landscape is found on the Dashboard overview as well. It’s called ActiveCare and according to the Dashboard...