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Automation Starts with Testing

Dennis Damen
Login VSI

There is no doubt that automation has become the key aspect of modern IT management.

The end-user computing market is no exception. With a large and complex technology stack and a huge number of applications, EUC specialists need to handle an ever-increasing number of changes at an ever-increasing rate.

Many IT organizations are starting to realize that they can no longer control the flow of changes. It is time to think about how to facilitate change.

Speeding Up Change

Automation is essential in speeding up the delivery of change in more than one way. I frequently hear people talking about how they wish they could reduce the number of repetitive tasks or speed up their ability to deploy. While these are most assuredly benefits of automation, they are certainly not the only ones.

My personal favorite is the consistency with which you can maintain your systems and repeatedly generate the same results. Having a consistent environment makes testing, troubleshooting, and even root cause analysis much more effective.

It feels liberating when you are confident that you can build consistent virtual desktop platforms and golden images with the press of a button. You can now direct your full focus on preparing, testing, and deploying changes.

Fail Faster

As any software engineer will tell you; if you want to speed up your development and get your number of support calls down, you need to get your testing in order. "Test-Driven Development" even states that you should write tests before you write your code.

I remember learning the hard way. We did not think we would need to test a simple Microsoft security fix before automatically deploying it to production. What could go wrong? Surely Microsoft would test their hotfixes … right? This simple security fix brought down a 5,000 user Citrix XenApp Farm. And, as I am sure you realize, restoring it felt like it took forever.

The point is that the sooner you find out a change is going to cause you (performance) issues, the faster you can fix them and prevent time-consuming repairs afterwards.

There's a solution for end-user computing experts who are serious about speeding up their change process while delivering exceptional end-user experience: testing the impact of planned changes on performance and compatibility in pre-production and catching disruptions due to unplanned changes early in production.

We want to hear your experiences with change — the good, the bad AND the ugly. What were your worst problems and how did you solve them? Don't hesitate to get in touch with us!

Dennis Damen is Sr. Product Manager at Login VSI

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Automation Starts with Testing

Dennis Damen
Login VSI

There is no doubt that automation has become the key aspect of modern IT management.

The end-user computing market is no exception. With a large and complex technology stack and a huge number of applications, EUC specialists need to handle an ever-increasing number of changes at an ever-increasing rate.

Many IT organizations are starting to realize that they can no longer control the flow of changes. It is time to think about how to facilitate change.

Speeding Up Change

Automation is essential in speeding up the delivery of change in more than one way. I frequently hear people talking about how they wish they could reduce the number of repetitive tasks or speed up their ability to deploy. While these are most assuredly benefits of automation, they are certainly not the only ones.

My personal favorite is the consistency with which you can maintain your systems and repeatedly generate the same results. Having a consistent environment makes testing, troubleshooting, and even root cause analysis much more effective.

It feels liberating when you are confident that you can build consistent virtual desktop platforms and golden images with the press of a button. You can now direct your full focus on preparing, testing, and deploying changes.

Fail Faster

As any software engineer will tell you; if you want to speed up your development and get your number of support calls down, you need to get your testing in order. "Test-Driven Development" even states that you should write tests before you write your code.

I remember learning the hard way. We did not think we would need to test a simple Microsoft security fix before automatically deploying it to production. What could go wrong? Surely Microsoft would test their hotfixes … right? This simple security fix brought down a 5,000 user Citrix XenApp Farm. And, as I am sure you realize, restoring it felt like it took forever.

The point is that the sooner you find out a change is going to cause you (performance) issues, the faster you can fix them and prevent time-consuming repairs afterwards.

There's a solution for end-user computing experts who are serious about speeding up their change process while delivering exceptional end-user experience: testing the impact of planned changes on performance and compatibility in pre-production and catching disruptions due to unplanned changes early in production.

We want to hear your experiences with change — the good, the bad AND the ugly. What were your worst problems and how did you solve them? Don't hesitate to get in touch with us!

Dennis Damen is Sr. Product Manager at Login VSI

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...