netmetic

[netmetic]

Benefits of People-First Approach to RPA - New IDC Research | UiPath

The most advanced, automation-rich enterprises leverage robotic process automation (RPA) as a means to elevate the potential of human workers.

  If this isn’t your first time on the UiPath blog, you’ve likely heard us mention ‘a robot for every person’ before. It’s long been a UiPath vision and we’re at a point where the vision is becoming a reality at UiPath and many of our customers.

  A recent IDC white paper sponsored by UiPath, explores the concept of "a robot for every worker" through a global survey of organizations and a series of in-depth interviews with organizations that have instituted broad and successful programs of this nature.

Benefits of People-First Approach to RPA - New IDC Research | UiPath published first on https://jiohow.tumblr.com/

[netmetic]

25 Top Enterprise AI Resources of 2020 | UiPath

This won’t be the first year someone predicted artificial intelligence (AI) would arrive. But 2020 was different: the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly accelerated the pace of adoption of digital transformation technologies.

  Customers we talk to want to use automation and AI to build resiliency as they prepare for the future. Heading into 2021, there’s no looking back: the era of enterprise artificial intelligence is upon us. And we’re not the only ones saying so: Forrester, too, predicts, “The time is now for AI to shine.”

  25 Top Enterprise AI Resources of 2020 | UiPath published first on https://jiohow.tumblr.com/

[netmetic]

Benefits of People-First Approach to RPA - New IDC Research | UiPath

The most advanced, automation-rich enterprises leverage robotic process automation (RPA) as a means to elevate the potential of human workers.

  If this isn’t your first time on the UiPath blog, you’ve likely heard us mention ‘a robot for every person’ before. It’s long been a UiPath vision and we’re at a point where the vision is becoming a reality at UiPath and many of our customers.

  A recent IDC white paper sponsored by UiPath, explores the concept of "a robot for every worker" through a global survey of organizations and a series of in-depth interviews with organizations that have instituted broad and successful programs of this nature.

Benefits of People-First Approach to RPA - New IDC Research | UiPath published first on https://jiohow.tumblr.com/

[netmetic]

25 Top Enterprise AI Resources of 2020 | UiPath

This won’t be the first year someone predicted artificial intelligence (AI) would arrive. But 2020 was different: the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly accelerated the pace of adoption of digital transformation technologies.

  Customers we talk to want to use automation and AI to build resiliency as they prepare for the future. Heading into 2021, there’s no looking back: the era of enterprise artificial intelligence is upon us. And we’re not the only ones saying so: Forrester, too, predicts, “The time is now for AI to shine.”

  25 Top Enterprise AI Resources of 2020 | UiPath published first on https://jiohow.tumblr.com/

[netmetic]

Security Starts with Intel

Security Strides Ahead with the 11th Gen Intel vPro mobile platform Security matters now more than ever. Cyber-attacks are moving down the computing stack. Threats are evolving to evade and obfuscate security software detection methods, and they are using remote worker endpoint PCs as a direct vector into networks, cloud, and SaaS applications. Our latest ...continue reading Security Starts with Intel

The post Security Starts with Intel appeared first on IT Peer Network.

Security Starts with Intel published first on https://jiohow.tumblr.com/

[netmetic]

Benefits of People-First Approach to RPA - New IDC Research | UiPath

The most advanced, automation-rich enterprises leverage robotic process automation (RPA) as a means to elevate the potential of human workers.

  If this isn’t your first time on the UiPath blog, you’ve likely heard us mention ‘a robot for every person’ before. It’s long been a UiPath vision and we’re at a point where the vision is becoming a reality at UiPath and many of our customers.

  A recent IDC white paper sponsored by UiPath, explores the concept of "a robot for every worker" through a global survey of organizations and a series of in-depth interviews with organizations that have instituted broad and successful programs of this nature.

Benefits of People-First Approach to RPA - New IDC Research | UiPath published first on https://jiohow.tumblr.com/

[netmetic]

Introducing the 11th Gen Intel vPro® platform: Built for Modern Business

When we first introduced the Intel vPro® platform almost 15 years ago, the world – and the workplace – looked quite different. And while we couldn’t imagine how the past year would unfold, it has proven that the Intel vPro platform was designed exactly for this moment. Our nearly 15 years of insights and feedback ...continue reading Introducing the 11th Gen Intel vPro® platform: Built for Modern Business

The post Introducing the 11th Gen Intel vPro® platform: Built for Modern Business appeared first on IT Peer Network.

Introducing the 11th Gen Intel vPro® platform: Built for Modern Business published first on https://jiohow.tumblr.com/

[netmetic]

Processor or Platform, What Matters More for Business-Class Performance?

Thank you to Intel IT Peer Network contributors: Gabriel Achanzar, director of worldwide technical marketing ; Rajaram Godbole, marketing engineer; Yasser Rasheed, global director of enterprise endpoint and security products.  Learn the difference between perception versus reality of business-class PC performance. When it comes to business PC performance, buyers have two primary misconceptions that can ...continue reading Processor or Platform, What Matters More for Business-Class Performance?

The post Processor or Platform, What Matters More for Business-Class Performance? appeared first on IT Peer Network.

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[netmetic]

Amdocs Voices

In 2021, the over-the-top (OTT) market will be primarily shaped by the consumer response to COVID-19. Darcy Antonellis shares what to expect.

Darcy Antonellis, Head of Amdocs Media, CEO of Vubiquity

This article originally appeared in M+E Journal.

  In 2021, the over-the-top (OTT) market will be primarily shaped by the consumer response to COVID-19 and their experiences throughout the pandemic. They tried new services, subscribed to different entry models and better understood what worked for them. Recent research from Amdocs Media indicated that roughly 30% of US consumers tried a new media subscription service during this “time of trials.”

  As the new year approaches, expect continued intense competition for subscriber acquisition and, most importantly, retention. In addition to more original content to keep consumers happy, we’re seeing new approaches like live virtual concerts from Spotify, and Amazon Music bringing musicians front and center with fans through a partnership with Twitch. Apple introduced bundled subscriptions for various offerings, while others like Microsoft refined their gaming portfolios with partnerships and cloud-based services. We’ll likely see more expansive bundles in 2021.

  OTT consumption has accelerated not just within the media and entertainment space but also across various digital consumer services. For example, during the early days of COVID-19, our research found that nearly a third of consumers took advantage of new online food or grocery services. Roughly 18 percent tried online gaming for the first time. Financially, we also found (pre-pandemic) that approximately 27 percent of surveyed consumers spend more than $100 a month on media and entertainment subscription services.

  As the overall environment becomes more complex, tools that enable consumers to manage a growing variety of services (heavily steeped in digital subscriptions and physical goods) in one centralized spot is where service providers can differentiate. The focus must be on making things easier, more accessible and visible for consumers.

Diverse bundles and the importance of partnerships

In many cases, the traditional service provider triple-play offerings have expanded to include an optional mix of big-name partners that give subscribers more freedom to go a-la-carte and have SVOD programming aligned to their favorite brands. This “optionality” to bundle connectivity with digital entertainment and consumer services has provided success for some well-executed CSP strategies around the globe.

  For OTT, media and entertainment players, there’s no reason to expect bundled incentives, free trials and new series originals will not continue into 2021. For example, in digital commerce, non-media digital and physical goods, COVID-19 has changed the consumer mindset to getting what they want without leaving the house. This brings an opportunity to work closely with service providers to bundle popular services during COVID-19, like online gaming, delivery services, remote work options, and eLearning. Partnerships will be a critical aspect to bring these new, bundled options to life. */

next steps

2021 predictions

More insight from Amdocs executives

  Predictions from a variety of Amdocs leaders on topics like 5G, cloud, COVID-19, entertainment, in-home connectivity and more

blog post

How to better manage OTT complexities: More insight from Darcy Antonellis

  With more offerings than ever, the OTT experience can be complicated. Darcy Antonellis shares how to make things easier for consumers

published first on https://jiohow.tumblr.com/

[netmetic]

5 Considerations for Building Advanced Monitoring for Your Event Broker

When it comes to event broker monitoring, it’s clear that there is no one tool to rule them all. While some of our customers use PubSub+ Monitor to monitor their event brokers, others build their own using tools such as ITRS Geneos, AppDynamics and Prometheus, just to name a few. For those building your own solution, the 5 considerations I’ll describe below will ensure that your event broker monitoring covers all the bases and sets you up for operational peace of mind.

To begin with, each monitoring tool will have its own method for collecting data from the systems and applications you wish to monitor. Then you create rules, alerts, and dashboards on top of that collected data. The examples in this post will be in the context of using ITRS Geneos, with the SolGeneos collector agent provided by Solace, but the ideas are transferrable to other monitoring tools.

1. Start Simple with Event Broker Status Monitoring

The first consideration is an easy one. The event broker itself has numerous status fields to inform on whether various aspects are enabled, running, and generally healthy. Leveraging what the event broker can report on through the SEMP protocol, your collection agent can query these fields and rules can be applied to give you a “green light” indicator.

For customers using SolGeneos, there are comprehensive out-of-the-box data views available to report on, such as ‘HBA status monitoring’.

An example is shown below of the event broker reporting on the status of each redundant fibre channel connection to the storage layer it relies on:

A data view showing one of the Fibre Channel links being in a ”Linkdown” state

  2. Event Broker Activity Monitoring is Just as Important

This next consideration might not be an intuitive one — if an event broker is being used for its intended function, what is there to monitor activity-wise? There are two dimensions to this reasoning:

Monitoring the usage activity can aid in detecting issues with the connected applications and services.

If your broker is a service in a shared-tenancy manner, monitoring activity will help you notice “noisy neighbors” jeopardizing the service.

If a virtual broker’s message and byte rate for a particular application is tracked over a period of time, you’ll have a good idea of its steady state. While there can be gradual increases observed as usage grows, experience has taught me that sudden deviations from that profile indicates abnormal activity or misbehaving applications. Some examples are: component releases going awry, services getting stuck in a publishing loop, lossy subscribers triggering continual re-publishing, and so on.

Putting activity monitoring in place keeps you from being left in the dark when it comes time to troubleshoot a volume-related incident after an outage. If you’re operating a multi-tenancy service, volume in one application may have caused an issue for another, unrelated application. As a service owner it is very beneficial to have a data-led conversation with application owners when you need to migrate a noisy tenant.

Below is an example of a data view showing message and data rates on a per message VPN basis, as well as the aggregate view across the whole event broker:

A data view showing metrics such as Average Byte Rate as well as the Top Talker VPN

  The view above has been generated by a custom addition to the SolGeneos extensible framework for collecting data through SEMP. The code is available open source in the SolaceLabs GitHub repo.

When you’re collecting data on these rates, it is helpful to track the peaks in addition to currently observed rates. For example, if the data is being charted for a dashboard, the high-watermark can be the straight line on the graph alongside the currently observed rates.

The example below shows the highest rate observed specifically for “Egress Message Rate” across the event broker, along with recording the top 3 VPNs by traffic generation at the time. There is an ‘all time high’ rate, as well as watermarks that reset on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.

A data view with a search filter applied to show captured high water mark values for the Current Egress Message Rate metric

  These high watermark rates are also useful when it comes to capacity management to ensure the peak rates have enough headroom to grow with the current infrastructure.

3. Keep a Close Eye on Your Capacity

After you have made sure the event broker is operating as expected and there is good ongoing activity of the service, your next concern is managing the various resource limits and proactively monitoring for high utilization. There are two dimensions to consider here:

For an application tenant using the event broker, what is the size of the virtual slice (i.e., message VPN) that has been created for them, and how is it being utilized?

Cumulatively speaking, what has been allocated to different message VPNs and how does that compare to the event broker’s hard limits?

Once again, the SEMP protocol makes it easy to query for each resource’s current usage and max limits, and create a monitoring view like this:

A data view showing each message VPN limit as well as its current usage value

The format of “Current” vs. “Max” for each metric makes it easy to construct general purpose rules too. The rule can access both values to calculate a percentage and dynamically alert/trigger across the different resource types and max limit values.

For the second dimension of ensuring the event broker limits are not being exceeded by the cumulative allocations at each message VPN, you can create a view like this:

A data view showing the broker-wide limits, current usage and current allocation.

  Another way of considering this particular message VPN limits allocation point is this: if all airline passengers show up for a flight, were there more seats sold than the available capacity of the aircraft?

4. Make Alerts Meaningful and Actionable

Sending alerts from the monitoring tool is a key aspect of the whole solution, because whether you’re generating an email, triggering the creation of a ticket, or posting to a chat channel, the alert is an interruption by design. Having served in an operational role where alerts woke me in the middle of the night, I can attest to the fact that everybody involved will appreciate it if you make alerts as informative and actionable as possible.

Take, for example, an alert just telling you that a message queue is filling up. The workflow could be to receive the alert, log into your administration tooling to gather more information and context to the alert, and then eventually take some action. How much more useful would it be for the alert to contain the information you’d need to triage the situation without logging into your administration tool? If a queue is filling up, questions you might want to answer could be:

Is there an application currently bound to the queue, or is the expected application down?

If it fills up, is the queue of the type that will block upstream publishers and therefore needs more urgent attention?

Below is an example of an ‘enhanced’ queue alert that was sent to a Slack channel. Note the extra information that helps with triage, like the fact that the queue’s high watermark level is the same as the current backlog level, which tells you this is an unprecedented situation for this application and queue.

An example alert for queue usage being high, enhanced with additional information such as high-watermark level and bind count

  Some of the logic behind triaging an alert could also be baked into rule logic, so recipients can determine the severity of the situation based on other pieces of data already factored in. The summary here is that the data collection agent needs to be comprehensive enough to capture and supply as much information as possible to drive this kind of triage, whether it is automated within the rule logic or done manually upon receipt of the alert.

A custom SolGeneos monitor for displaying a rich set of queue information is also included in the GitHub repository mentioned earlier.

5. Consider Synthetic Monitoring for a Holistic Approach

Last but not least, my favorite recommendation. Relying on metrics and other collected data only goes so far to provide peace of mind for the health of the event broker as a service. For most deployments, there is a lot of other supporting infrastructure involved. At the very least you may have a DNS alias for your event broker’s connection URI, so the DNS service and the entries within it need to be correct and responding. You may also be fronting your event brokers with a load balancer, so that needs to be responding well and routing the traffic appropriately.

Synthetic monitoring is the idea of testing a service by actually trying to use it for its purpose. Loading a website to validate that your webserver is working is one such example of synthetic monitoring. To that end, the code for a ‘Messaging Tester’ monitor has been made available in the GitHub repository where the monitoring data pushed by the SolGeneos agent is actually the result of performing a message send and receive test to a topic and queue destination. The ‘Message Tester’ monitor produces a view like this when the tests pass as successful, and will provide detailed information about the cause of failures when they don’t:

A dataview showing a successful publish and subscribe test against the broker at URI: london.solace.com

  As a side effect of the published test messages also being subscribed to by the same process, it allows for round-trip latency to be calculated too. It should be stressed that this latency number will certainly not be the lowest latency messaging that can be achieved by the event broker; this is because the monitoring host, nor the process, would have been tuned for low-latency. However, the number you get is still a good indicator of some baseline performance that can be achieved by the monitor acting like a real messaging client. Monitoring how that baseline latency number changes between test samples can be informative in an operational sense too. Furthermore, logging the value to a time-series database can provide a view of this changing over time.

Synthetic monitoring like this does not only validate that messaging is working end-to-end, but it can also validate that performance is within an expected tolerance and that issues like network congestion or packet loss are not impacting the experience of messaging clients connected to the event broker.

Conclusion

I hope these 5 recommendations give you peace of mind that if the monitoring dashboard is green, the service is healthy. Please review the GitHub repository for more detail around the open-source monitor samples.

The post 5 Considerations for Building Advanced Monitoring for Your Event Broker appeared first on Solace.

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[netmetic]

How to Replicate Your kdb+ Instances with Solace PubSub+

When deploying your kdb+ estate, you may have struggled to efficiently and easily replicate your kdb+ instances around the globe or in the cloud. While there are many strategies that you can use, such as chained tickerplants or duplicating your feedhandler processes, all of them add complexity. In this post, I will introduce why you might want to replicate kdb+ instances, and explain how you can easily accomplish this natively with q and Solace PubSub+.

Why replicate your kdb+ instances?

Your initial deployment of kdb+ applications may look something like this image, where you start out with your feedhandler pushing data into your kdb instance in New York and users across the globe are accessing the instance. As your user base grows, you may scale out your kdb+ instances horizontally, but you still incur latency costs as every query/response has to transit the WAN. So, as your user base grows, this architecture may not work as well.

There are a few issues we would like to solve here by replicating your kdb+ instances across the globe:

Reduce latency – If you have a number of users querying in every location, you want to reduce the time it takes for the results to be seen by the end user.

Reduce load on your kdb infrastructure – The longer it takes a query to execute and the results to be delivered, the less responsive your kdb+ instance becomes.

Improve resiliency – Having all your kdb+ infrastructure in a single location results in increased probability of a failure condition affecting your entire userbase.

Considerations for your kdb+ replication stack

While there are various methodologies you may employ to achieve replication for your kdb+ instances, you would want to ensure the following:

WAN latency does not affect the operation of your kdb+ instances. In the case of a WAN network outage/latency across your WAN links, you would want to ensure that this would not impact the performance of your kdb+ instances.

Native integration with q. Rather than relying on infrastructure replication techniques such as SRDF, you would want the replication technique to be natively integrated with q.

Control what is being replicated. Since the replication technology is natively implemented in q, you now can implement logic to what exactly is being replicated or even enhance the data that is being replicated.

Replicating your kdb+ data with Solace PubSub+

As discussed in the previous post, using the Kx Fusion Interface you can natively send messages to Solace PubSub+. Combining this capability with subscribing to your tickerplant, you can send updates to a Solace PubSub+ Event Broker in one region, have Solace PubSub+ forward the message to brokers in another region, and then push the updates into your tickerplant in the other region. The benefit of this pattern is that it can even be extended to the public cloud.

Creating an Event Mesh

Creating an event mesh – a cluster of brokers – sounds complicated but it’s actually extremely simple with Solace PubSub+. Follow these instructions in this video to link brokers together.

A sample implementation

Consider a single table quote with the following schema:

quote

time timestamp sym symbol bidPrice float askPrice float bidSize integer askSie integer

quote:([]time:`timestamp$();sym:`symbol$();bid:`float$();ask:`float$();bsize:`int$();asize:`int$())

Now to set up a process to subscribe from your tickerplant and publish onto Solace PubSub+, you could do something like this:

sendToSolace:{[t;d] if[not 98h=type d;:(::)]; d:update `g#sym from d s:exec distinct sym from d; topics:{[t;s] "/" sv ("solace/kdb";string t;string s)}[t] each s; json:{[d;s] .j.j select from d where sym=s}[d] each s; .solace.sendDirect'[topics;json] } upd:sendToSolace;

In a nutshell, the code above will retrieve the name of the table and the sym from the record, construct a well-defined topic (example: solace/kdb/quote/AAPL), and send the record(s) as a json record onto  Solace PubSub+.

Now, in the other geography/location you will set up a Solace PubSub+ subscriber using something like the following code:

onmsg:{[dest;payload;dict] j:.j.k "c"$payload; h(".u.upd";`quote;(.z.P;exec `$sym from j;exec "f"$bid from j;exec "f"$ask from j;exec "i"$bsize from j;exec "i"$asize from j)) } .solace.setTopicMsgCallback`onmsg .solace.subscribeTopic[`$"solace/kdb/quote/>";1b];

The code above will subscribe to all messages that start with the topic solace/kdb/> and push into the quote table.

Conclusion

Using Solace PubSub+ with kdb+ gives you a low-touch and frictionless way to achieve a robust replication strategy for your kdb+ stack. The Solace PubSub+ Event Broker is also completely free to use as a docker container. You can find all code referenced above in the kdb-tick-solace repo.

The post How to Replicate Your kdb+ Instances with Solace PubSub+ appeared first on Solace.

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[netmetic]

Evangelizing RPA In Your Organization - Get Everyone On Board | UiPath

No matter how clear the business benefits of robotic process automation (RPA) technology may be, the deployment approach—“How do we roll it out?”—may be a challenging new concept for many companies. While many organizations have a successful track record implementing enterprise technologies, an RPA project demands knowledge of existing processes and how employees perform their jobs.

  As a result, many companies may wonder what they should do to implement their first RPA program and how to communicate its benefits. Others may have achieved success with their RPA pilot but struggle when it comes to rolling it out to other departments in the organization. Such uncertainty is understandable, especially considering that this part of the RPA experience is relatively new.

  Yet one best practice has emerged.

  To successfully deploy the RPA program—and reap as many benefits as possible across the entire organization—companies need a well-defined RPA communications and advocacy plan consisting of three important touch points:

Evangelizing RPA In Your Organization - Get Everyone On Board | UiPath published first on https://jiohow.tumblr.com/

[netmetic]

5 Considerations for Building Advanced Monitoring for Your Event Broker

When it comes to event broker monitoring, it’s clear that there is no one tool to rule them all. While some of our customers use PubSub+ Monitor to monitor their event brokers, others build their own using tools such as ITRS Geneos, AppDynamics and Prometheus, just to name a few. For those building your own solution, the 5 considerations I’ll describe below will ensure that your event broker monitoring covers all the bases and sets you up for operational peace of mind.

To begin with, each monitoring tool will have its own method for collecting data from the systems and applications you wish to monitor. Then you create rules, alerts, and dashboards on top of that collected data. The examples in this post will be in the context of using ITRS Geneos, with the SolGeneos collector agent provided by Solace, but the ideas are transferrable to other monitoring tools.

1. Start Simple with Event Broker Status Monitoring

The first consideration is an easy one. The event broker itself has numerous status fields to inform on whether various aspects are enabled, running, and generally healthy. Leveraging what the event broker can report on through the SEMP protocol, your collection agent can query these fields and rules can be applied to give you a “green light” indicator.

For customers using SolGeneos, there are comprehensive out-of-the-box data views available to report on, such as ‘HBA status monitoring’.

An example is shown below of the event broker reporting on the status of each redundant fibre channel connection to the storage layer it relies on:

A data view showing one of the Fibre Channel links being in a ”Linkdown” state

  2. Event Broker Activity Monitoring is Just as Important

This next consideration might not be an intuitive one — if an event broker is being used for its intended function, what is there to monitor activity-wise? There are two dimensions to this reasoning:

Monitoring the usage activity can aid in detecting issues with the connected applications and services.

If your broker is a service in a shared-tenancy manner, monitoring activity will help you notice “noisy neighbors” jeopardizing the service.

If a virtual broker’s message and byte rate for a particular application is tracked over a period of time, you’ll have a good idea of its steady state. While there can be gradual increases observed as usage grows, experience has taught me that sudden deviations from that profile indicates abnormal activity or misbehaving applications. Some examples are: component releases going awry, services getting stuck in a publishing loop, lossy subscribers triggering continual re-publishing, and so on.

Putting activity monitoring in place keeps you from being left in the dark when it comes time to troubleshoot a volume-related incident after an outage. If you’re operating a multi-tenancy service, volume in one application may have caused an issue for another, unrelated application. As a service owner it is very beneficial to have a data-led conversation with application owners when you need to migrate a noisy tenant.

Below is an example of a data view showing message and data rates on a per message VPN basis, as well as the aggregate view across the whole event broker:

A data view showing metrics such as Average Byte Rate as well as the Top Talker VPN

  The view above has been generated by a custom addition to the SolGeneos extensible framework for collecting data through SEMP. The code is available open source in the SolaceLabs GitHub repo.

When you’re collecting data on these rates, it is helpful to track the peaks in addition to currently observed rates. For example, if the data is being charted for a dashboard, the high-watermark can be the straight line on the graph alongside the currently observed rates.

The example below shows the highest rate observed specifically for “Egress Message Rate” across the event broker, along with recording the top 3 VPNs by traffic generation at the time. There is an ‘all time high’ rate, as well as watermarks that reset on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.

A data view with a search filter applied to show captured high water mark values for the Current Egress Message Rate metric

  These high watermark rates are also useful when it comes to capacity management to ensure the peak rates have enough headroom to grow with the current infrastructure.

3. Keep a Close Eye on Your Capacity

After you have made sure the event broker is operating as expected and there is good ongoing activity of the service, your next concern is managing the various resource limits and proactively monitoring for high utilization. There are two dimensions to consider here:

For an application tenant using the event broker, what is the size of the virtual slice (i.e., message VPN) that has been created for them, and how is it being utilized?

Cumulatively speaking, what has been allocated to different message VPNs and how does that compare to the event broker’s hard limits?

Once again, the SEMP protocol makes it easy to query for each resource’s current usage and max limits, and create a monitoring view like this:

A data view showing each message VPN limit as well as its current usage value

The format of “Current” vs. “Max” for each metric makes it easy to construct general purpose rules too. The rule can access both values to calculate a percentage and dynamically alert/trigger across the different resource types and max limit values.

For the second dimension of ensuring the event broker limits are not being exceeded by the cumulative allocations at each message VPN, you can create a view like this:

A data view showing the broker-wide limits, current usage and current allocation.

  Another way of considering this particular message VPN limits allocation point is this: if all airline passengers show up for a flight, were there more seats sold than the available capacity of the aircraft?

4. Make Alerts Meaningful and Actionable

Sending alerts from the monitoring tool is a key aspect of the whole solution, because whether you’re generating an email, triggering the creation of a ticket, or posting to a chat channel, the alert is an interruption by design. Having served in an operational role where alerts woke me in the middle of the night, I can attest to the fact that everybody involved will appreciate it if you make alerts as informative and actionable as possible.

Take, for example, an alert just telling you that a message queue is filling up. The workflow could be to receive the alert, log into your administration tooling to gather more information and context to the alert, and then eventually take some action. How much more useful would it be for the alert to contain the information you’d need to triage the situation without logging into your administration tool? If a queue is filling up, questions you might want to answer could be:

Is there an application currently bound to the queue, or is the expected application down?

If it fills up, is the queue of the type that will block upstream publishers and therefore needs more urgent attention?

Below is an example of an ‘enhanced’ queue alert that was sent to a Slack channel. Note the extra information that helps with triage, like the fact that the queue’s high watermark level is the same as the current backlog level, which tells you this is an unprecedented situation for this application and queue.

An example alert for queue usage being high, enhanced with additional information such as high-watermark level and bind count

  Some of the logic behind triaging an alert could also be baked into rule logic, so recipients can determine the severity of the situation based on other pieces of data already factored in. The summary here is that the data collection agent needs to be comprehensive enough to capture and supply as much information as possible to drive this kind of triage, whether it is automated within the rule logic or done manually upon receipt of the alert.

A custom SolGeneos monitor for displaying a rich set of queue information is also included in the GitHub repository mentioned earlier.

5. Consider Synthetic Monitoring for a Holistic Approach

Last but not least, my favorite recommendation. Relying on metrics and other collected data only goes so far to provide peace of mind for the health of the event broker as a service. For most deployments, there is a lot of other supporting infrastructure involved. At the very least you may have a DNS alias for your event broker’s connection URI, so the DNS service and the entries within it need to be correct and responding. You may also be fronting your event brokers with a load balancer, so that needs to be responding well and routing the traffic appropriately.

Synthetic monitoring is the idea of testing a service by actually trying to use it for its purpose. Loading a website to validate that your webserver is working is one such example of synthetic monitoring. To that end, the code for a ‘Messaging Tester’ monitor has been made available in the GitHub repository where the monitoring data pushed by the SolGeneos agent is actually the result of performing a message send and receive test to a topic and queue destination. The ‘Message Tester’ monitor produces a view like this when the tests pass as successful, and will provide detailed information about the cause of failures when they don’t:

A dataview showing a successful publish and subscribe test against the broker at URI: london.solace.com

  As a side effect of the published test messages also being subscribed to by the same process, it allows for round-trip latency to be calculated too. It should be stressed that this latency number will certainly not be the lowest latency messaging that can be achieved by the event broker; this is because the monitoring host, nor the process, would have been tuned for low-latency. However, the number you get is still a good indicator of some baseline performance that can be achieved by the monitor acting like a real messaging client. Monitoring how that baseline latency number changes between test samples can be informative in an operational sense too. Furthermore, logging the value to a time-series database can provide a view of this changing over time.

Synthetic monitoring like this does not only validate that messaging is working end-to-end, but it can also validate that performance is within an expected tolerance and that issues like network congestion or packet loss are not impacting the experience of messaging clients connected to the event broker.

Conclusion

I hope these 5 recommendations give you peace of mind that if the monitoring dashboard is green, the service is healthy. Please review the GitHub repository for more detail around the open-source monitor samples.

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Evangelizing RPA In Your Organization - Get Everyone On Board | UiPath

No matter how clear the business benefits of robotic process automation (RPA) technology may be, the deployment approach—“How do we roll it out?”—may be a challenging new concept for many companies. While many organizations have a successful track record implementing enterprise technologies, an RPA project demands knowledge of existing processes and how employees perform their jobs.

  As a result, many companies may wonder what they should do to implement their first RPA program and how to communicate its benefits. Others may have achieved success with their RPA pilot but struggle when it comes to rolling it out to other departments in the organization. Such uncertainty is understandable, especially considering that this part of the RPA experience is relatively new.

  Yet one best practice has emerged.

  To successfully deploy the RPA program—and reap as many benefits as possible across the entire organization—companies need a well-defined RPA communications and advocacy plan consisting of three important touch points:

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Managing Platforms in the Modern Era

High reliability and availability require the right tools and a commitment to maintenance. For more than fifty years, Intel customers have looked to us to deliver the highest levels of product quality. This commitment to quality has been key to our success and is more important than ever in the increasingly complex modern era of ...continue reading Managing Platforms in the Modern Era

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The Fully Automated Enterprise Is Here (And Looks Like This) | UiPath

We’re witnessing the rise of a new type of company: the fully automated enterprise™. Fully automated enterprises have the potential to revolutionize how business is done and, in their wake, leave entire industries transformed.

  Our customers are excited about the potential of full enterprise automation but curious about the path. We listened. Above all, our customers wanted an example, a model of a fully automated enterprise they could take back to their company and say, “This! This is what I want!”

  In my previous article, I explained what a fully automated enterprise was and why your company should become one. I also described the four pillars your company could use to transform into a fully automated enterprise.

  Now, I’ll walk you through what a fully automated enterprise really looks like using a fictitious company based on a real use case.

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2020 Automation Award Winners & Advice For Emerging Tech | UiPath

Having joined UiPath in the first half of 2017, I consider myself fortunate to have experienced it for a short while as a scale-up company with a startup mindset, but also to have been part of the exciting journey of it becoming the global organization it is today.

  It was probably during the first all hands meeting I attended that I heard UiPath Co-Founder and CEO Daniel Dines mentioning customer centricity as one of the core tenets of the company. “Guys, the customer knows better and is smarter than us,” he was pointing out. More than three years down the line, we believe this made all the difference for the company. More on this a bit later on.

  There is a common sentiment for everyone in UiPath to keep honoring our roots and giving back. And it’s the very thing that birthed an exciting initiative, the UiPath Automation Awards CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) & Turkey. The competition was pioneered last year by our Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) Vargha Moayed. In his own words:

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