How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 2

APMdigest posed the following question to the IT Operations community: How should ITOps adapt to the new normal? In response, industry experts offered their best recommendations for how ITOps can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 2 covers communication and collaboration.

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 1

VIRTUAL TEAM CULTURE

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps leaders should focus on fortifying a virtual team culture that fosters an environment for open communication. In a remote and digital world, it's imperative that teams communicate effectively.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

ONLINE-FIRST CULTURE

Our office culture placed a high value on in-person interactions, so office budgets were targeting an inviting atmosphere. During the overnight change to work-from-home, we worried that we'd lose our office culture, so tried to adapt our in-person office culture to online forums. We held video conferences with an effort to create a facsimile experience — but it turns out it was not possible. The online experience works best where there is one voice at a time. We made a mistake in attempting to adapt our in-person office culture, and it's just not fully reproducible. This mistake led to trial and error, and we realized that we couldn't recapture what we had in-person, so instead had to create a new online-first culture. We are still working on this. So far we found ways to balance communication, using tools like company messaging apps and video conferencing. In ways, we now have better company-wide communication. The communication limit of one voice at a time allowed us to condense information into numerical goals, for instance we have breakout general gathering video conversations for general chats.
Stephen Blum
CTO and Co-Founder, PubNub

TEAM ALIGNMENT

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps and DevOps leaders should onboard a streamlined process that ensures team alignment.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

SET NUMERIC GOALS

We found that focusing on communication using numeric goals and progress towards them helped. Numeric goals are easy to communicate visually (bar graphs) and explain in a short sentence.
Stephen Blum
CTO and Co-Founder, PubNub

PRIORITIZE AND DELEGATE

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps and DevOps leaders should learn how to prioritize and delegate correctly.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

CROSS-ORGANIZATIONAL VISIBILITY

The need for cross-organizational visibility is more critical now than ever before. IT teams can often be siloed — and working from home can make that worse. To find gaps in IT operation hand-offs, track productivity (response to tickets, support workloads by operator, development release cycles, etc.) over time to see if there has been a major change (up or down) in workloads and engagement. Examine your teams' workflows and identify places where tools sprawl might be creating delays due to mental switching costs; streamline through integration and/or aggregating monitoring, change and topology data into a single pane of glass. IT Ops teams will have less competing noise, better understanding of the health of their IT Operations and the right tools to help them.
Assaf Resnick
CEO, BigPanda

ASYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION

Ever since the work-from-home mandates started, ad hoc conversations and resources that were already scattered are often going into a black hole. For many engineers, it's become overwhelming to keep up with all of the communications when working out of the office. To succeed from home, teams need to maintain real-time, aggregated communication streams.
Tina Huang
Founder and CTO, Transposit

High stakes and urgent (synchronous) communication are especially challenging during Covid. I vote that teams invest in automation and monitoring that enables employees to move fast — coordinating asynchronously and with guardrails built in — yet recover quickly when things go wrong.
Mohit Tiwari
CEO and Co-Founder, Symmetry Systems

MAINTAIN FEEDBACK LOOP

Knowing that feedback is a key element to the culture of your ITOps teams, it is critical to address the lack of in-person feedback in a remote culture. Creating several, smaller touch points is critical to keeping this feedback loop going without creating more arduous meetings.
Collin Mariner
Analyst, Gigaom

OFFICE HOURS

We have seen success by scheduling 30 minutes near the end of each day for what we call office hours. We publish our office hours to the entire organization and encourage anyone to join. This allows us to be available to the organization for asks that typically come in person, as well as receive more real-time feedback.
Collin Mariner
Analyst, Gigaom

MAKE A CONNECTION

The most prepared IT leaders will develop new programs for engaging staff that may feel disconnected.
Sean McDermott
CEO, Windward Consulting Group

Listen to the AI+ITOPS Podcast with special guest Sean McDermott

Read Windward Consulting's New Report: 2020 COVID-19 IT Economic Impact Study

COLLABORATION TOOLS

As remote work has become a mainstay of doing business, ITOps should work with their company's CTO and CSO to offer the right mix of collaboration tools for employees. Remote work will continue to add stress for employees, and it's the company's job to provide a framework of respect for the home situations of their employees and the tools/resources they need to be successful, such as video conferencing platforms, Google Drive, and notification systems. ITOps teams should regularly evaluate the performance of their organization's communication and collaboration tools to ensure employees can maintain their productivity levels while working remotely.
Marc Linster
CTO, EDB

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, few enterprises had made the leap forward to remote working. When the pandemic hit, many companies transitioned to a fully remote work environment, accelerating the trend many years ahead in a matter of months. ITOps suddenly needed to fight an uphill battle, supporting a remote workforce of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. Setting up the proper infrastructure, in terms of tools and processes, is the number one priority, ensuring that in the short term the company survives and long term that it thrives. New tools must be procured, which inherently are built to support remote collaboration, particularly for mission critical roles such as SREs.
Odysseas Lamtzidis
Developer Relations, Netdata

Go to: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 3

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While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

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For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

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As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

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The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

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Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

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How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 2

APMdigest posed the following question to the IT Operations community: How should ITOps adapt to the new normal? In response, industry experts offered their best recommendations for how ITOps can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 2 covers communication and collaboration.

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 1

VIRTUAL TEAM CULTURE

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps leaders should focus on fortifying a virtual team culture that fosters an environment for open communication. In a remote and digital world, it's imperative that teams communicate effectively.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

ONLINE-FIRST CULTURE

Our office culture placed a high value on in-person interactions, so office budgets were targeting an inviting atmosphere. During the overnight change to work-from-home, we worried that we'd lose our office culture, so tried to adapt our in-person office culture to online forums. We held video conferences with an effort to create a facsimile experience — but it turns out it was not possible. The online experience works best where there is one voice at a time. We made a mistake in attempting to adapt our in-person office culture, and it's just not fully reproducible. This mistake led to trial and error, and we realized that we couldn't recapture what we had in-person, so instead had to create a new online-first culture. We are still working on this. So far we found ways to balance communication, using tools like company messaging apps and video conferencing. In ways, we now have better company-wide communication. The communication limit of one voice at a time allowed us to condense information into numerical goals, for instance we have breakout general gathering video conversations for general chats.
Stephen Blum
CTO and Co-Founder, PubNub

TEAM ALIGNMENT

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps and DevOps leaders should onboard a streamlined process that ensures team alignment.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

SET NUMERIC GOALS

We found that focusing on communication using numeric goals and progress towards them helped. Numeric goals are easy to communicate visually (bar graphs) and explain in a short sentence.
Stephen Blum
CTO and Co-Founder, PubNub

PRIORITIZE AND DELEGATE

In order to adapt to the new normal, ITOps and DevOps leaders should learn how to prioritize and delegate correctly.
Kalyan Ramanathan
VP of Product Marketing, Sumo Logic

CROSS-ORGANIZATIONAL VISIBILITY

The need for cross-organizational visibility is more critical now than ever before. IT teams can often be siloed — and working from home can make that worse. To find gaps in IT operation hand-offs, track productivity (response to tickets, support workloads by operator, development release cycles, etc.) over time to see if there has been a major change (up or down) in workloads and engagement. Examine your teams' workflows and identify places where tools sprawl might be creating delays due to mental switching costs; streamline through integration and/or aggregating monitoring, change and topology data into a single pane of glass. IT Ops teams will have less competing noise, better understanding of the health of their IT Operations and the right tools to help them.
Assaf Resnick
CEO, BigPanda

ASYNCHRONOUS COMMUNICATION

Ever since the work-from-home mandates started, ad hoc conversations and resources that were already scattered are often going into a black hole. For many engineers, it's become overwhelming to keep up with all of the communications when working out of the office. To succeed from home, teams need to maintain real-time, aggregated communication streams.
Tina Huang
Founder and CTO, Transposit

High stakes and urgent (synchronous) communication are especially challenging during Covid. I vote that teams invest in automation and monitoring that enables employees to move fast — coordinating asynchronously and with guardrails built in — yet recover quickly when things go wrong.
Mohit Tiwari
CEO and Co-Founder, Symmetry Systems

MAINTAIN FEEDBACK LOOP

Knowing that feedback is a key element to the culture of your ITOps teams, it is critical to address the lack of in-person feedback in a remote culture. Creating several, smaller touch points is critical to keeping this feedback loop going without creating more arduous meetings.
Collin Mariner
Analyst, Gigaom

OFFICE HOURS

We have seen success by scheduling 30 minutes near the end of each day for what we call office hours. We publish our office hours to the entire organization and encourage anyone to join. This allows us to be available to the organization for asks that typically come in person, as well as receive more real-time feedback.
Collin Mariner
Analyst, Gigaom

MAKE A CONNECTION

The most prepared IT leaders will develop new programs for engaging staff that may feel disconnected.
Sean McDermott
CEO, Windward Consulting Group

Listen to the AI+ITOPS Podcast with special guest Sean McDermott

Read Windward Consulting's New Report: 2020 COVID-19 IT Economic Impact Study

COLLABORATION TOOLS

As remote work has become a mainstay of doing business, ITOps should work with their company's CTO and CSO to offer the right mix of collaboration tools for employees. Remote work will continue to add stress for employees, and it's the company's job to provide a framework of respect for the home situations of their employees and the tools/resources they need to be successful, such as video conferencing platforms, Google Drive, and notification systems. ITOps teams should regularly evaluate the performance of their organization's communication and collaboration tools to ensure employees can maintain their productivity levels while working remotely.
Marc Linster
CTO, EDB

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, few enterprises had made the leap forward to remote working. When the pandemic hit, many companies transitioned to a fully remote work environment, accelerating the trend many years ahead in a matter of months. ITOps suddenly needed to fight an uphill battle, supporting a remote workforce of tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. Setting up the proper infrastructure, in terms of tools and processes, is the number one priority, ensuring that in the short term the company survives and long term that it thrives. New tools must be procured, which inherently are built to support remote collaboration, particularly for mission critical roles such as SREs.
Odysseas Lamtzidis
Developer Relations, Netdata

Go to: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 3

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Why VM and Container Monitoring Is Not Enough for Cloud-Hosted Autonomous Agents

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...