Unlimited opportunity

In a data-driven world, pretty much anything boils down to leveraging data and controls. And with a DataMiner platform in place, the opportunities for DevOps Professionals to innovate and contribute to the goals of an organization are virtually unlimited. Therefore, being a DevOps Professional is also very much about being creative, thinking out of the box, reimagining, and challenging the status quo.

It is good practice to start with topics that people and organizations care about. This typically includes optimizing utilization of resources, increasing quality of service, improving operational efficiency, easing complexity and reducing margin for human error, hardening security, reducing footprint, and much more.

Solutions can focus on one single instance of a specific product (e.g. monitoring and managing a Kubernetes or Elasticsearch cluster, easily managing, configuring, onboarding, or auditing an IP switch, setting up or diagnosing a single instance, etc.) or target a specific overall sub-domain or sub-system (e.g. managing an IP network, providing an overview and live management of all servers, all your products X from vendor Y, etc.). Or they can focus on specific key topics within a domain (e.g. PTP monitoring of an IP network, network security auditing, IT service testing via PINGs or other synthetic tests, etc.).

Overall, there are many angles from which you can look at one piece of technology or a specific domain. It can be monitored, it can be looked at from a longer-term capacity management perspective, you can run troubleshooting diagnostics or perform security audits, facilitate onboarding or replacement of components, run performance or regressions tests, and much more.

Alternatively, instead of being technology and product oriented, a solution can also focus on business and operational workflows, encompassing areas like live SLA management of all services, ticketing, incident management, planned maintenance, event management, change management, costing & billing, channel management, etc. It can also involve the management of virtual assets such as OB vans, vehicles, rooms and facilities, human resources, satellite capacity, IP addresses, virtual signal groups, contracts, rate cards, and more.

Moreover, solutions can prioritize broader DataMiner perspectives that are applicable to any environment, such as a Service Penalty box, an Element Penalty box, Inventory & Asset management, Anomaly management, User Activity overviews, Fault or Performance management, etc.

But solutions can also serve as demonstrators and samples to showcase what is possible, thereby being leveraged by others as quick-start packages or for training and educating other DevOps Professionals. For instance, this could involve an app showing the capabilities with a Google Maps component, ad hoc data sources allowing people to easily draw live data from public internet APIs, like the real-time position of satellites in space or a sample of a typical earth station, among others.

Ultimately, it is all about converting data and controls into value towards the operation. Always start by defining the actual goal, and then start brainstorming and designing the most optimal solution, always keeping that goal in mind as your touchstone. And do not forget that, ultimately, the only measure of success for your endeavor will be the effective utilization of your solution.