OP5 Monitor update

Welcome to the third OP5 Monitor newsletter of 2020. Under current circumstances, working from home policies are likely to remain in place, or at least a hybrid policy that involves a combination of home and office working.  The pandemic has highlighted the need for enterprises to have good monitoring processes in place, allowing them to quickly resolve issues, as well as monitor the use of their platform, enabling them to scale quickly.

The move towards home working has also accelerated the adoption of cloud solutions. As the cloud cannot be adopted overnight, it is now common for companies to be operating on a combination of on-premise and cloud solutions. As a consequence, it is important for firms to have a centralized view of their whole IT estate. Here at ITRS we call this combination of cloud and on-premise Hybrid-IT, and catering to this combination is a key part of our vision for OP5 Monitor and sits at the heart of its development.

Our recent focus has been enabling OP5 Monitor to run in dynamic environments such as Kubernetes and OpenShift, which has involved containerizing both the OP5 Monitor Server and the Poller (Slim Poller). We are looking to constantly develop in this area, improving support for dynamic environments enabling OP5 Monitor to make use of the dynamic features in these environments.

Alongside this, we are also working on Security Hardening. As a result, we have increased security around scaling by enabling the encryption of traffic between OP5 Monitor Servers and Pollers with Public Key Encryption. This adds value to any enterprise that has a focus on security, but particularly those that deploy Pollers in networks that they don’t control.

As well as devoting resources to the functions contained within OP5 Monitor we are also continuously developing the new UI ad supporting API. Progress on this has been so quick that we are planning to launch a Minimum Viable Product (MvP), with the aim to receive early feedback from customers, ensuring we are on the right track. While on the topic of customer feedback, we are glad to announce that we have had our first virtual North EMEA Customer Advisory Board (CAB), with our first meeting end of September, focusing on the topics of Hybrid IT and Cloud Cost Optimisation.

When it comes to product documentation we are continuously improving, already having made significant changes this year. We also wanted to highlight an update to the release schedule, with it now being incorporated into the release notes and in the compatibility matrix, enhancing your ability to plan your updates to OP5 Monitor.

With that we say goodbye for now. Stay safe.