Glossary

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What is Active Directory?

Active Directory (AD) is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. Windows Server operating systems include it as a set of processes and services. A domain controller (DC) is a server running the Active Directory Domain Service (AD DS) role. It authenticates and authorizes all users and computers in a Windows domain-type network, assigning and enforcing security policies for all computers and installing or updating software.

What Agentless Monitoring?

Monitoring IT infrastructures often involves the installation of agent software on target servers to collect performance metrics about the servers and application servers executing on them. The need to install and maintain agent software on all monitored servers is a key drawback with this approach.

Agentless monitoring collects performance metrics from the infrastructure without installing any agent software on the servers or devices being monitored – which makes the agentless approach easier to manage.

What is AIOps?

AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) is a term coined by Gartner in 2016 as an industry category for machine learning analytics  technology that enhances IT operations analytics covering operational tasks include automation, performance monitoring and event correlations, among others.

What are Alarm Priorities?

When an incident happens in an IT infrastructure or relating to an IT application, IT operations teams receive a number of alarms. Each alarm provides details of an abnormality in the IT infrastructure or with the application. Examples of alarms could be high CPU usage on a server, many blocked threads in an application, slow responses from the database, etc. To be able to troubleshoot issues, IT teams need to be able to set priorities for alarms, so they can focus on the highest priority alarms first.

What is Amazon Appstream 2.0?

Amazon AppStream 2.0 allows organizations to publish individual applications that are then streamed to end users on any device using an HTML5 browser, providing those applications as SaaS (Software as a Service).

What is Amazon CloudWatch?

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service originally built for DevOps engineers, developers, site reliability engineers (SREs), and IT managers. CloudWatch collects monitoring and operational data in the form of logs, metrics, and events from AWS resources, applications, and services that run on AWS and on-premises servers. With investment in staff skillsets and configuration, CloudWatch can be used to detect anomalous behavior in your environments, set alarms, visualize logs and metrics side by side, take automated actions, troubleshoot issues, and discover insights to keep applications running smoothly.

What is Amazon WorkSpaces?

Amazon WorkSpaces is a managed, secure Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution that allows administrators to provision Windows and Linux desktops in minutes. An Amazon WorkSpace is a cloud-based virtual desktop that can act as a replacement for a traditional desktop. A WorkSpace is available as a bundle of compute resources, storage space, and software applications that allow a user to perform day-to-day tasks just like using a traditional desktop.

What is Amazon WorkSpaces Core?

Amazon WorkSpaces Core is a set of VDI APIs for third-party software. WorkSpaces Core enables customers and partners to build customized VDI solutions using purpose-built compute instances optimized for virtual desktops. This means that vendors such as Citrix and VMware can offer VDI and DaaS products that will use AWS infrastructure rather than on-prem virtualized options such as VMware vSphere/ESXi hosts or XenServer.

What is Apache ActiveMQ?

Apache ActiveMQ is a popular open source, multi-protocol, Java-based message broker. It supports industry standard protocols allowing users to connect from clients written in JavaScript, C, C++, Python, .NET, and other languages. Apache ActiveMQ is written in Java together with a full Java Message Service (JMS) client.

What is Apache Hadoop?

The Apache Hadoop Java software library is an open-source framework enabling the distributed (and parallel) processing of extensive datasets across computer clusters using straightforward programming models. It is built to scale from a single server to thousands of machines, each providing local computation and storage. Instead of depending on hardware for high availability, the library is designed to detect and manage failures at the application layer, thereby providing a highly available service on a cluster of computers, each of which may experience failures.

What is Apache Kafka?

Apache Kafka is a distributed event store and stream-processing platform. It is an open-source system developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Java and Scala. It is designed for handling real-time data streams and is often used in large-scale, distributed, and data-intensive applications. Kafka is used for messaging, monitoring and metrics collection, logging, website activity tracking, real-time analytics and many other use cases.

What is Apache Tomcat?

Apache Tomcat, also referred to as Tomcat, is an open-source web server and servlet container developed by the Apache Software Foundation. It provides a Java-based environment for running web applications that are written in Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technologies.

What is API Monitoring?

An application programming interface (API) is the set of protocols that helps your product communicate with other products through a web address (or API endpoint). This process allows enterprises to integrate their regularly used applications with third-party plugins and services to create an even more robust experience.

What is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)? 

Application performance monitoring is the strategy and practice of continuously monitoring and tracking the performance of business applications and the user experience of end users as they access the applications to understand trends, isolate anomalies, and get actionable insight for problem resolution and code optimization.

What is an Application Server?

At its core, an application server is a physical or virtual machine that sits between the operating system or user-facing application and the external resources (such as a database management system) needed to run the applications.

What is Autodiscovery for IT monitoring?

Autodiscovery in the context of IT monitoring refers to the process of automatically identifying and mapping resources, devices, applications, and services within an IT infrastructure. It involves dynamically detecting and adding new components to the monitoring system without manual intervention, which allows for efficient and up-to-date monitoring coverage.

What is automatic baselining?

Automatic baselining in IT monitoring refers to the process of dynamically establishing performance baselines for various metrics and parameters within an IT infrastructure. It involves using machine learning algorithms and statistical analysis of metrics to continuously analyze and adapt to the changing behavior of monitored systems. AIOps monitoring and observability systems implement automatic baselining amongst other automation technologies.

What is AWS?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud service providers in the industry, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally. A large spectrum of clients across verticals uses AWS to lower costs, become more agile and innovate faster. A recent survey estimates that AWS is the largest cloud service provider and accounts for 45% of the worldwide cloud services market.

What is AWS EC2?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud service providers in the industry. A large spectrum of clients across verticals uses AWS to lower costs, become more agile and innovate faster.

What is Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure (formerly Windows Azure) is a cloud computing platform and set of services provided by Microsoft. It offers a wide range of tools and resources for building, deploying, and managing applications and services in the cloud. Azure is built upon a global network of data centers designed to build, deploy, and manage critical computing, networking, storage, and analytics services.

What is Azure Active Directory?

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsoft's multi-tenant, cloud-based Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. It takes care of authentication and authorization of user and application identities. It's the digital infrastructure that allows your employees to sign in and access external resources, such as those held in Microsoft 365 service, an ever-growing list of other SaaS applications, as well as those held on corporate networks.

What is Azure Monitor?

Azure Monitor is Azure's native monitoring tool that can monitor your applications hosted on Azure and the Azure infrastructure. Azure Monitor can be to get useful dashboards and reports, but setting up the monitoring can be time-consuming and challenging. Manual setup is needed, and admins need to specify each metric and threshold. Furthermore, there is a cost per metric and even based on the type of threshold. This is where a third-party Azure monitoring tool like eG Enterprise helps. It is simple to setup, licensing is not per metric and you can even monitor multi-cloud deployments from a central console.

What is Azure Storage?

Azure Storage is Microsoft's cloud computing storage solution that provides highly scalable, durable, and available storage services for applications and data. It offers several types of storage services to cater to different needs.

What is Azure Virtual Desktop?

Microsoft released its desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offering, Azure Virtual Desktop AVD (previously Windows Virtual Desktop), in September 2019. The service runs on Azure and provides a multi-user version of Windows 10 and Windows 11, a feature unavailable for on-premises deployments of Hyper-V. Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) technology is growing in popularity as a means of delivering virtual desktops in the cloud to users.

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What is Chaos Engineering?

Chaos Engineering is a discipline that aims to uncover weaknesses and improve the resilience of software systems by intentionally injecting controlled failures into them.

Robust, resilient IT systems are crucial to data-driven operations. Whether these systems drive internal processes or deliver customer-facing services, the need for reliability and availability remains the same. So, why would you deliberately try to break your services? Chaos engineering does just that - deliberately terminating instances in your production environments.

What is Citrix?

Citrix is a U.S.-based software company founded in 1989 that offers virtualization and cloud computing software. A pioneer in the remote access space, the company's core mission is to provide a better way to work by allowing people and the enterprise organizations they work for to choose precisely what that entails.

What is Citrix Cloud?

Technically, Citrix Cloud isn't a product that the company sells access to. Rather, it's the name Citrix uses to refer to a collection of services associated with the Citrix Cloud Platform. The platform's job is to host and administer all Citrix cloud services.

What is Citrix DaaS?

Citrix Desktops-as-a-Service (DaaS) is a hybrid cloud service that allows you to securely deliver a high-performance virtual apps and desktops experience to any device. Whereas Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops was primarily meant for on-premises installation and delivery, with Citrix DaaS, the control plane is hosted and managed by Citrix. The control plane includes the Citrix Delivery Controllers, Citrix StoreFront, Citrix Gateway, License server, Citrix datastore, etc. The resource plane which includes the virtual app servers and virtual desktops can remain on-premises or it can be hosted and operated by the customer on the cloud.

What is Citrix Receiver?

Citrix Receiver (now called Citrix Workspace App) is the client software that provides a unified and secure digital workspace for accessing Citrix virtual desktops, applications, and data from any device, anywhere. It is designed to simplify the user experience and enhance productivity by offering a single point of access to all the resources needed to perform work tasks. Employees and remote workers can access their work environments remotely, even using mobile devices.

What is Citrix Studio?

Administrators can manage a Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops deployment using two management consoles: Web Studio (web-based) and Citrix Studio (Windows-based).

What is Citrix Workspace App?

Citrix Workspace App (previously called Citrix Receiver) is the client software that provides a unified and secure digital workspace for accessing Citrix virtual desktops, applications, and data from any device, anywhere. It is designed to simplify the user experience and enhance productivity by offering a single point of access to all the resources needed to perform work tasks. Employees and remote workers can access their work environments remotely, even using mobile devices.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing refers to the delivery of computing services-including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, and more-over the internet ("the cloud") to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. Details of Cloud infrastructures and technologies can be found in: What is Cloud Infrastructure? | eG Innovations.

What is Cloud Infrastructure?

The term "Cloud Infrastructure" has been used more frequently in recent years. In simple terms, cloud infrastructure refers to the virtualized, on-demand resources and services provided over the internet. It comprises computing power, storage, and networking capabilities delivered by hyperscale cloud service providers such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Users can access and manage these resources remotely, scaling up or down based on demand. This infrastructure eliminates the need for physical hardware, enabling flexibility, cost-efficiency, and rapid deployment of applications. It underpins cloud computing services, offering a foundation for businesses to host applications, store data, and leverage computing resources without the burden of managing traditional, on-premises infrastructure.

What is Cloud Monitoring?

So your organization has decided to move to the cloud. Smart move! Many companies today are either making the move to the cloud or have already made it. According to RightScale's 2019 State of the Cloud Survey, 94% of IT professionals say their companies use the cloud. Over 90% is public cloud. Gartner predicts that public cloud revenue will increase by 17% in 2020. The biggest percentage increase is expected with IaaS.

What is ColdFusion?

ColdFusion is a rapid web application development platform from Adobe Systems. It supports a server-side scripting language that allows developers to build dynamic websites and web applications.

What are Containers?

A container is a lightweight unit of software that includes application code and all its dependencies such as binary code, libraries, and configuration files for easy deployment across different computing environments. Since a container is self-contained and includes all dependencies, the application it supports will run reliably across different computing environments.

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What is DaaS (Desktop as a Service)?

DaaS is a technology solution that delivers virtual desktops and applications straight from the cloud to users' devices. Because some enterprises find it too expensive or time-consuming to create and deploy their own virtual desktops, they pay another company to do it for them.

What is DevOps?

The term DevOps is a combination of the words "development" and "operations". In practice, DevOps is a collaborative approach to the work that is performed by an enterprise's IT operations staff and their application developers. Collaboration and communication between these two teams, who might otherwise function separately, are meant to increase the speed and quality of product or application releases.

What is a Digital Workspace?

Digital workspaces (sometimes called virtual workspaces) are a key technology that organizations use to support remote employees and workers. Popular technology choices available include Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (CVAD), VMware Horizon, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services, Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), Amazon WorkSpaces, and Amazon AppStream 2.0, among others.

Digital Workspace Monitoring?

Ensuring your digital workspaces are operating efficiently will help your team be more productive and accomplish mission-critical tasks. Whether it's tracking how quickly applications are running, monitoring for security breaches, or ensuring that collaboration tools are up and running, digital workspace monitoring keeps you in the know. If a problem arises with your digital workspaces, you can proactively address the issue to avoid costly downtime and employee frustration.

What is Distributed Tracing?

Distributed tracing is a method used in distributed systems to trace the path of an application request as it travels through different services and components - from frontend applications to middleware to backend services and database servers.

The history of Dizzion Frame and who Dizzon are

Dizzion is a company that was founded in 2011, at a time when traditional Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) from vendors such as VMware and Citrix were the de facto enterprise choice to deliver digital workspaces. Dizzion set out to offer an alternative by building an automation and services platform on top of the Omnissa (formerly VMware) Horizon stack, Dizzion delivered virtual desktops as a service before “Desktop as a Service” (DaaS) had become “a thing”.

What is Docker?

Docker is an open-source platform for developing, shipping, and running applications, which enables developers to automate the deployment and management of applications within software containers. Docker simplifies the process of packaging software and its dependencies into containers, providing isolation, scalability, and efficient resource utilization. Containerization is now a standard practice in modern software development with Docker being one of the most widely used technologies.

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What is Endpoint Monitoring?

In IT, an endpoint is an internet-capable hardware device on a TCP/IP network. An endpoint serves as a connection point for communicating with a network or accessing a service, it is often a device such as a computer or smartphone. Beyond consumer devices such as laptops and phones, the term endpoint now also encompasses devices such as tablets, information screens, thin clients, printers and other specialized hardware, such as actuators, point of sale (POS) terminals and smart meters.

What is Endpoint Security Monitoring?

Endpoint Security Monitoring is a cybersecurity practice that involves real-time surveillance and analysis of activities on individual devices within a network, such as laptops, workstations, thin clients, and mobile devices. Unlike traditional antivirus solutions, which focus on known threats, Endpoint Security Monitoring employs advanced techniques, including behavioral analysis and AIOps / machine learning, to detect and respond to both known and unknown threats. It provides continuous visibility into endpoint activities, enabling the identification of suspicious behavior, anomalies, and potential security incidents. This proactive approach helps organizations strengthen their defense against cyber threats, enhancing overall cybersecurity resilience at the device level.

What is etcd?

etcd (pronounced et-see-dee) is an open-source, distributed key-value store that provides a way to store data that needs to be accessed by a distributed system or cluster of machines. etcd is widely used for configuration management, service discovery, and scheduler coordination of distributed systems or clusters of machines.

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What is an F5 Load Balancer?

An F5 load balancer is a network solution (often a hardware device, although increasingly the term "Load Balancer" is used for software solutions) that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers to ensure no single server becomes overwhelmed, enhancing the availability, performance, and reliability of applications and services. The term "F5" refers to products and services offered by F5, Inc., a company known for its application delivery networking (ADN) technology.

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What is the GlassFish application server?

GlassFish is an open-source, fully Java EE-compliant application server (including support for Java Servlets, JSPs, EJBs, JPA, JMS and more). It provides a platform for developing, deploying, and managing Java-based enterprise applications. It is developed by the Eclipse Foundation and is based on the Java EE reference implementation.

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What is Help Desk?

Just about everyone in the business world has heard of a "help desk". You have probably used your company's help desk yourself on many occasions. But what is a help desk exactly? And more importantly, what does a help desk do, and why is it so important for your business?

What is HTTP/2?

HTTP/2 is a major revision of the HTTP network protocol used for transferring web content over the Internet. It was developed to address the limitations and performance issues of its predecessor, HTTP/1.1. HTTP/2 was standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in May 2015 as RFC 7540.

What is Hybrid Cloud?

Hybrid cloud, at its best, seamlessly combines on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and public cloud resources, providing flexibility for organizations to manage workloads across diverse environments. This type of environment typically involves a connection from an on-premises data center to a public cloud and may also involve other private assets, including edge devices. This approach allows businesses to maintain control over sensitive data while utilizing the scalability and innovation offered by public cloud services, adapting to evolving IT needs.

What is Hypervisor?

A hypervisor is software that enables virtualization, allowing multiple operating systems (OSs) or virtual machines (VMs) to run on a single physical computer or server. Without virtualization, you can only run one operating system on the hardware. A Hypervisor acts as an intermediary layer between the physical hardware and the virtualized environments, managing and allocating resources like CPU, memory, and storage to the virtual machines.

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What is IBM WebSphere?

IBM WebSphere is a brand of proprietary enterprise software products that facilitate the development, deployment and management of applications. WebSphere is a platform for building scalable and secure applications and integrating applications with other applications.

What is IaaS?

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a form of cloud computing service that offers compute, storage and networking resources on-demand, usually on a pay-as-you-go basis. Businesses can purchase resources on-demand and as-needed instead of having to buy the hardware outright.

What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?

IaC, meaning "infrastructure as code," involves defining the digital infrastructure you need using code instead of manual setups. Yes, you heard that right; it entails using code, just like what you work with when creating apps. With IaC, you script out the instructions and configurations for your virtual servers, operating systems, and other infrastructure components. You can then take these scripts, or templates, and use them to automatically provision and manage your tech stack. Infrastructure as code allows you to write your network just like you create your applications. Do you need more server space? Just update the code. Do you want to replicate your environment for a new project? Copy your code, and you'll be ready to launch your new project in no time. IaC turns your IT infrastructure into a repeatable, version-controlled template that is efficient, error-free, and easily shareable. Think of all the time and resources you'll save with this handy tool.

What is Infrastructure Monitoring?

Exactly what is infrastructure monitoring? Infrastructure monitoring is the process of tracking performance, availability, and resource utilization of backend IT assets.

What Is IT Infrastructure?

IT infrastructure is the combined and interconnected components that are required to operate and manage an enterprise's IT environment. It encompasses the hardware, software, networks, facilities, and any other parts necessary to deliver IT service to employees within an organization, as well as to partners and customers outside of it.

What is IT service management (ITSM)?

IT Service Management (ITSM) is one of the most impactful and important aspects of your IT strategy. However, while many people may have heard of ITSM, unless you are directly involved with the associated processes, you might be uncertain about precisely what it is or what perks it provides.

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Summary

Sometimes a Java application could struggle to meet service level performance or scalability agreements. One of the key symptoms of a poorly performing Java application is "High Java CPU". SREs and IT Operations teams need to diagnose the correct root-cause of high Java CPU.

What is Java Heap Memory? What is Java Heap Space?

In Java, the heap memory refers to a region of the Java Virtual Machine's (JVM) memory that is dedicated to storing objects created during the execution of a Java program. It is one of the key components of the JVM's memory structure and is managed by the JVM's memory management subsystem.

What is a Java thread?

A thread in Java is the path followed when executing a program. All Java programs have at least one thread, known as the main thread, which is created by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) at the program's start, when the main() method is invoked.

What is JBoss?

JBoss, also known as WildFly, is an open-source Java-based application server and runtime environment developed by Red Hat. It provides a platform for hosting and running Java applications, particularly enterprise-level applications.

What is JEUS?

JEUS (an abbreviation of Java Enterprise User Solution) is a Web application server developed by TmaxSoft, a software company based in South Korea. JEUS provides the web application server component of TmaxSoft's middleware-tier framework solution. It has been widely adopted in South Korea and has the highest share among web application servers in that market.

What is the JVM?

A JVM, or Java Virtual Machine, is an abstract computing machine that provides an execution environment for Java programs. It is a key component of the Java platform, enabling the cross-platform compatibility and portability that Java is known for.

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What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes (also known as K8s) is an open-source container orchestration platform framework that automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It provides a scalable and resilient framework for running applications in a distributed environment, abstracting away the complexities of infrastructure management.

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What is Liferay?

Liferay is a software company that provides digital experience platforms (DXPs) for businesses to create and manage customer experiences across web, mobile, and connected devices. Liferay is well known for Liferay DXP (Digital Experience Platform) launched in 2016, an enterprise platform for building, deploying, and maintaining web portals, websites, and other digital experiences.

What is Linux VDI?

VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) solutions can be implemented using Linux-based operating systems as the host for virtual desktops or as the client for accessing virtual desktops. To give context, various parts of a VDI solution may be Linux based,

What is Load Testing?

Load testing is a type of performance testing that simulates real-world user loads and traffic on a system or application to evaluate its performance and behavior under expected or peak usage conditions. The primary goal of load testing is to determine the system's ability to handle the anticipated workload and to identify any performance bottlenecks or issues that may arise under heavy load.

What are log files?

Log files are software-generated files containing information about the operations, activities, and usage patterns of an application, server, or IT system.

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What is a Message Queue?

A message queue is a form of communication used in distributed systems and software architectures where different components or processes need to communicate asynchronously. It is a mechanism that allows messages (packets of data) to be sent and received between different parts of a system without the components being directly connected or synchronized in time.

What is .NET?

.NET is an open-source developer platform for building many different types of apps. The platform is often referred to as "Microsoft .NET" since Microsoft developed it. However, unlike traditional Microsoft products, .NET is free to use and considered open-source.

What is IIS?

Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS, formerly known as Internet Information Server) is extensible web server software created by Microsoft for use with the Windows family. IIS runs on Windows systems to serve requested HTML pages or files.

What is Microsoft Intune?

Microsoft Intune is a cloud-based endpoint management solution, sometimes described as an Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution. It manages user access to organizational resources and simplifies app and device management across many devices, including mobile devices, thin clients, desktop computers, and virtual endpoints. Microsoft Intune provides mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM).

What is Microsoft RDS?

Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS) is a branded, proprietary protocol for application and desktop virtualization. Like any remote desktop solution, it allows users to access a desktop remotely.

What is Microsoft SCOM?

The Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is one of the most robust and well-known operations management solutions on the market. But what is SCOM, exactly?

What is Microsoft SQL Server?

As we prepare to take a deep dive into Microsoft's SQL Server, it is a pre-requisite to understand the answer to the surface-level question, "What is SQL Server?". Many relational database management systems (RDBMS) are built on what is known as Structured Query Language (SQL), a standardized programming language that makes it easier for IT professionals and database administrators (DBAs) to manage your data and query information within a server.

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is often simplistically described as Microsoft 365's built-in business messaging app. However it is more than a simple tool for sending direct messages between co-workers. It's a dynamic, collaborative platform you can use to view sent or stored files, make audio or video calls, host virtual meetings, and much more.

What is Mosquitto MQTT?

Mosquitto MQTT is an open-source message broker that implements the MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) protocol. Mosquitto is lightweight and is suitable for use on a wide range of devices ranging from low power single board computers to full servers.

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What is Nerdio?

Nerdio is a vendor supplying platforms offering tooling and automation functionality around AVD on Azure. Nerdio was established in 2005 as a supplier for MSPs (Managed Service Providers) and as such, now has two distinct products: one focused on individual enterprises (Nerdio Manager for Enterprise formerly called Nerdio Manager for AVD) and the other (Nerdio Manager for MSP) specifically for MSPs managing multi-tenanted environments.

What is NetFlow?

NetFlow is a proprietary network protocol originally developed for Cisco routers by Cisco Systems. It is widely used to collect metadata about the IP traffic flowing across network devices such as routers, switches and hosts. By monitoring and analyzing NetFlow data, administrators can gain insights into network traffic flow and volume.

What is NetScaler?

Netscaler refers to networking products and application delivery controllers (ADC) developed by the Cloud Software Group. ADCs are appliances/devices or software solutions that optimize and manage the delivery of applications across networks.

What is Network Monitoring?

Network monitoring is the process of observing and analyzing network infrastructure, devices, and traffic to ensure optimal performance, availability, and security. It involves collecting and analyzing data to gain insights into the network's health, identify slow traffic and potential issues, and facilitate efficient network management.

What is Nutanix?

Nutanix is a company focused on delivering hyper-converged infrastructure solutions and cloud technologies. Founded in 2009, Nutanix focuses on simplifying data center operations and enabling organizations build, deploy and manage large-scale virtualized infrastructures easily.

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What is Observability?

Applied to IT, observability is how the current state of an application can be assessed based on the data it generates. Applications and the IT components they use provide outputs in the form of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT). Analysis of metrics, logs and traces is used to estimate the health of the target application.

What is Office 365?

Microsoft Office 365 is a powerful cloud-based productivity platform that includes apps like Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneDrive, as well as intelligent cloud services and advanced security.

What is Omnissa?

Omnissa is the rebrand of the former VMware End-User Computing (EUC) business. Omnissa is owned by the private equity firm KKR.

What is On-premises?

"On-premises" refers to the computing infrastructure, systems, software, and data that are located within an organization's physical premises or facilities, such as its office buildings or data centers. In an on-premises setup, the organization owns, maintains, and manages all aspects of its IT infrastructure, including hardware, networking equipment, servers, storage, and software, on its own premises rather than relying on cloud-based or off-site services. This approach contrasts with cloud computing, where services and resources are provided over the internet by third-party providers and are not physically located on the organization's premises.

What is OpenShift? What is Red Hat OpenShift?

Over the last couple of years, Kubernetes (often called K8s) has become the most popular and well-known container orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. Scheduling containers at scale in a cloud-native ecosystem is central to the technology. Kubernetes itself is an open-source project, and as such presents challenges for many enterprises, especially in regulated industries with strong security requirements and formal SLA commitments.

What is Oracle WebLogic?

Oracle WebLogic is a Java application server that is widely used to deploy, run and manage enterprise Java applications. It is widely used in distributed computing environments where applications need to be scalable, reliable and high performing. Organizations across different verticals including banking, telecommunications, retail, healthcare and more use Oracle WebLogic for deploying Java-based web applications.

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What is a Payment Gateway?

A payment gateway is a technology that facilitates online transactions by acting as an intermediary between an online merchant, a customer, and the financial institutions involved in the transaction. It enables secure and seamless transfer of funds from the customer's payment source (such as a credit card, debit card, or digital wallet) to the merchant's account.

What is PeopleSoft?

PeopleSoft is a comprehensive enterprise software suite from Oracle Corporation. It provides various integrated applications designed to help organizations manage their human resources, finance, supply chain, and customer relationship management (CRM) processes. The software is known for its flexibility, scalability, and ability to handle complex organizational structures.

What is PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service)?

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provides a framework for application creation and deployment. The technical stack required for application development is available on the cloud, which requires no download or local installation.

What is Platform Engineering?

Platform Engineering is a discipline within the field of software development and IT operations that focuses on designing, building, and maintaining the underlying infrastructure, frameworks, and tools that support the development, deployment, and operation of applications. It aims to create a robust and scalable platform that enables development teams to efficiently build and deliver software in a consistent and reliable manner.

What is Podman?

Originally developed by Red Hat engineers along with the open-source community, the Podman project defines Podman as "a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode.

What is a Polyglot?

In the context of Application Performance Monitoring (APM), the term "polyglot" typically refers to the ability of an APM tool or system to support and monitor applications written in multiple programming languages or frameworks. A polyglot APM solution is versatile and can adapt to the diverse technological stack often found in modern software architectures.

What is Proactive Monitoring?

Proactive monitoring is an IT monitoring approach in which systems, applications, and networks are continuously observed and analyzed to detect potential issues, anomalies, or performance degradations before they escalate into significant problems or outages. It involves setting up monitoring tools and practices that enable the early detection of issues and allow timely intervention to prevent disruptions and ensure optimal system performance and availability.

What is Proxmox?

Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) is an open-source server virtualization platform based on Debian Linux. It allows users to deploy and manage virtual machines (VMs) and containers within a single integrated solution. Proxmox VE combines two powerful virtualization technologies, namely Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) for full virtualization and Linux Containers (LXC) for lightweight virtualization.

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What is RabbitMQ?

RabbitMQ is an open-source message broker software that facilitates communication between different parts of a distributed system or between different applications. It is part of the AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) standard but can also be used with other popular messaging solutions such as MQTT to provide a scalable and reliable platform for exchanging messages.

What is Rancher?

Rancher is an open-source container management platform that simplifies the deployment and management of containerized applications. It provides tools for managing multiple Kubernetes (K8s) clusters across different environments, including on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Rancher offers features such as centralized authentication, monitoring, and deployment pipelines, making it easier for organizations to adopt and manage containerized infrastructure efficiently.

What is Real User Monitoring?

Real user monitoring (RUM) is a passive performance monitoring technique that allows you to see your web application performance from the point of view of a real end user. RUM analyzes all user interactions with a website or clients interacting with a server or cloud-based application. Monitoring actual user interaction with a website or an application is important to operators to determine if users are being served quickly and without errors and, if not, which part of a business process is failing.

What is Redis?

Redis (Remote Dictionary Server) is an in-memory data structure store, used as a distributed, in-memory key-value database, cache and message broker, with optional durability. Redis supports different kinds of abstract data structures, such as strings, lists, maps, sets, sorted sets, HyperLogLogs, bitmaps, streams, and spatial indices. Redis is open-source software released under a BSD 3-clause license although commercially supported paid versions are also available for enterprise users; Redis, Inc. commercially supports Redis Enterprise, which is available as an on-premises software deployment and a fully managed cloud service.

What is Root Cause Analysis (RCA) - IT Monitoring?

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) within the context of monitoring tools refers to the process of identifying and addressing the fundamental reason behind a particular problem or incident in an IT infrastructure or application environment. Monitoring tools with root cause analysis capabilities aim to go beyond surface-level symptoms and identify the underlying issue that is causing disruptions, errors, or performance degradation.

What is Root Cause Analysis - Business Processes?

Root cause analysis (RCA) is a foundational concept in business. But what is root cause analysis, exactly, and more importantly, how do you perform one?

As its name suggests, root cause analysis is a quality control strategy that allows you to uncover the underlying cause of an incident or issue.

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What is SaaS (Software-as-a-Service)?

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a web-based software deployment model that makes the software accessible through a web browser. As a user of SaaS software, you don't care where the software is hosted, which operating system it uses, or which language it is written in. The SaaS software is made accessible from any device as long you have an internet connection. With SaaS, you do not incur the capital cost of buying servers or software. The service provider shields you from software maintenance and you simply connect to the SaaS application via a console dashboard or API. Typical examples would include Microsoft Office 365, Intuit, Salesforce CRM, Zoom, ZoomInfo, Dropbox, Google Apps and many more that are for consumption by end-users. These applications run on the cloud and need not be downloaded to a local device. Webmail such as Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc., is one of the earliest forms of SaaS.

What is SAP NetWeaver?

SAP NetWeaver is a technology platform that enables organizations to integrate processes, workflows, data, and elements into a unified SAP environment. It does so by "weaving" data from various sources into a SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform.

What is Server Monitoring?

Server monitoring refers to monitoring the health of servers in your IT infrastructure, irrespective of whether these servers are hosted on physical machines, virtual machines, or on cloud instances.

What is Serverless?

Serverless computing, often referred to as just "Serverless", is a cloud computing application development and execution model that enables developers to build and run application code without provisioning or managing backend infrastructure or servers.

What is SharePoint?

SharePoint is the main component of Office 365 that makes collaboration possible. In addition to file sharing and organization, it includes SharePoint Workflows, SharePoint PerformancePoint, and SharePoint project sites. Together, these apps facilitate sharing and managing data around the world. As with email, the Microsoft IIS, SharePoint servers and Microsoft SQL database servers needed to provide collaboration services are operated by Microsoft. IT organizations can administer and manage the collaboration services without having to worry about maintaining these servers, patching them at regular intervals, upgrading the software, etc. All these activities are handled by Microsoft as part of their SaaS offering.

What is Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a discipline that combines software engineering and operations to ensure the reliable and efficient functioning of complex systems. SRE focuses on building and maintaining scalable, reliable, and highly available systems by applying software engineering principles to IT operations problems. It involves creating automation, monitoring, and incident response systems to proactively prevent and resolve issues. SRE teams work closely with development teams to improve system performance, reliability, and resilience. The goal of SRE is to minimize service disruptions, optimize performance, and continuously improve the overall reliability of a system or application.

What is SNMP?

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behavior.

What is Snowflake?

Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing platform that provides data storage, analysis, and reporting. It is designed to be highly scalable, secure, and highly available, and supports a wide range of data types and sources.

What is an SSL certificate?

An SSL certificate (Secure Sockets Layer certificate) is a digital certificate that authenticates and encrypts the communication between a web server and a client's web browser. It establishes a secure and encrypted connection, ensuring that data transmitted between the server and browser remains private and protected from eavesdropping or tampering.

What is Stress Testing?

Stress testing in IT is a type of performance testing used to evaluate how a system or application performs under extreme conditions beyond its normal operational capacity. It involves subjecting the system to high loads, heavy traffic, or resource limitations to identify its breaking points, measure its stability, and determine its ability to recover gracefully. Stress testing helps uncover weaknesses, bottlenecks, and potential failure points in the system, allowing for improvements to be made before deployment to production.

What is Synthetic Monitoring?

Organizations depend on fully functioning IT systems and processes to attract customers, deliver services and manage internal operations. The operation of these systems and processes directly impacts the business and reputation of each organization. Ensuring that all IT systems and processes are fully functional 24x7 is a key component of any organization's IT performance management strategy. This is where synthetic monitoring comes in.

What is Synthetic Testing?

Synthetic Testing and Synthetic Monitoring are terms often used interchangeably. Synthetic testing and synthetic monitoring, while related, are not identical practices.

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What is TCS BaNCS?

TCS BaNCS is a global banking platform developed by Tata Consultancy Services for use by retail and corporate banks, digital-challenger, private, Islamic banks of varying sizes, co-operatives, non-banking financial institutions, micro-lenders, and credit unions to transform and modernize their core systems. A rich set of APIs and capabilities allow a bank to do business with anyone and for anyone to do business with the bank.

What is Terraform?

Terraform is developed by HashiCorp, it was an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) software tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure. It enables users to define and provision infrastructure resources using a declarative configuration language. With Terraform, infrastructure is defined in code using a domain-specific language (DSL) - often HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), allowing for versioning, collaboration, and automation of infrastructure deployments. Terraform supports various cloud providers, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, as well as on-premises and hybrid environments. This means users can use the same tool for GCP, Azure, and AWS, and maintain a degree of cloud-agnosticism long-term.

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What is Uptime?

The current uptime of a server is measured as the amount of time that the server has been up and running since the last time it rebooted. Uptime is expressed in years, months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Every time the server reboots, up time is reset to 0 (zero) and starts increasing as the server remains up and operational.

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What is VHD(x)?

The Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format is a publicly available image format specification that allows encapsulation of the hard disk into an individual file for use by the operating system as a virtual disk in all the same ways physical hard disks are used. These virtual disks are capable of hosting native file systems (NTFS, FAT, exFAT, and UDFS) while supporting standard disk and file operations. VHD API support allows management of virtual disks. Virtual disks created with the VHD API can function as boot disks.

What is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)?

Many organizations have adopted virtual desktop infrastructures to securely allow access to their corporate networks and applications to remote users. Users login to a portal and once authenticated, they can access their virtual desktop from the browser itself, or through a separate client (e.g., Citrix Workspace App, Horizon client, etc).

What is VMware App Volumes?

VMware App Volumes is a real-time application delivery system that enterprises use to dynamically deliver and manage applications and their lifecycle. Applications are bundled in AppStacks and are delivered by attaching a standard VMDK or VHD file to a virtual machine.

What is VMware Horizon?

VMware Horizon (formerly called VMware View) is a leading technology for secure delivery of virtual desktop and applications across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Using the Horizon Client application installed on client devices, users can connect to the Horizon infrastructure. Users can also use a web browser as an HTML client when accessing the Horizon infrastructure from devices on which installing client software is not possible. With PCoIP and Blast Extreme protocols being used, VMware Horizon facilitates the delivery of high-end graphics and video content. Instant Clones and App Volumes technologies in Horizon enable fast and on-demand delivery of desktops.

What is VMware Tanzu?

VMware Tanzu is a portfolio of products and services designed to help organizations build, manage, and run modern applications on Kubernetes-based infrastructure in a supported manner across on-premises, cloud and edge infrastructure. It is part of VMware's efforts to provide tools and solutions for organizations looking to embrace cloud-native application development and containerization technologies.

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What is Windows 365?

Windows 365 is a cloud-based service from Microsoft that delivers a Windows virtual machine, aka the Cloud PC, to your end users. Each Cloud PC is assigned to an individual user and is their dedicated Windows device. Windows 365 is available in two editions: Windows 365 Business and Windows 365 Enterprise. Both editions rely on Entra ID which was previously known as Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and provide a dedicated Windows device to users for a fixed monthly subscription cost. To briefly summarize the differences:

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What is XenServer?

XenServer is an open-source server virtualization platform based upon the open-source Xen hypervisor (a type-1 / bare-metal hypervisor). XenServer is used for hosting virtualized server and client operating systems and provides performance comparable to that of bare metal servers.

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What is Zabbix?

Zabbix is an open-source monitoring software for networks, servers, virtual machines (VMs), cloud services and applications, providing real-time performance data, alerting, and visualization to ensure system reliability. Zabbix monitors a wide range of operating systems, including: Windows, Linux, macOS, Unix variants (e.g., FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX), Virtualization platforms (e.g., VMware, Hyper-V) and Network devices with embedded OS (e.g., Cisco IOS).