IT Systems Management Definitions

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  • A

    Alpine Linux

    Alpine Linux is a small, security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on the musl C standard library and BusyBox utilities instead of GNU.

  • AMD (Advanced Micro Devices)

    Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is a semiconductor company, known for designing and developing computer processors and graphics technologies.

  • AMD Virtualization (AMD-V)

    AMD-V (AMD Virtualization) technology refers to a set of hardware extensions and on-chip features for the AMD family of x86 microprocessors.

  • What is AI in networking?

    AI in networking involves the application of artificial intelligence technologies, including machine learning, deep learning and advanced data analytics, to automate, optimize and secure network operations.

  • What is AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations)?

    Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) is an umbrella term for the use of big data analytics, machine learning (ML) and other AI technologies to automate and enhance IT operations.

  • What is an automated script?

    An automated script is a code snippet that executes repetitive or complex tasks such as provisioning infrastructure, managing security vulnerabilities, setting up data pipelines and testing software, with little or no human intervention.

  • What is an automation engineer and how do you become one?

    An automation engineer designs and develops autonomous systems to manage repetitive tasks and improve efficiency and productivity.

  • What is Application Performance Index (Apdex)?

    Application Performance Index, also known as Apdex, is an open standard intended to simplify reports of application performance.

  • B

    bare-metal hypervisor (Type 1 hypervisor)

    A bare-metal hypervisor, also known as a Type 1 hypervisor, is virtualization software that has been installed directly onto the computing hardware.

  • C

    chaos engineering

    Chaos engineering is the process of testing a distributed computing system to ensure that it can withstand unexpected disruptions.

  • COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language)

    COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) is a high-level programming language for business applications. It was the first popular language designed to be operating system-agnostic and is still in use in many financial and business applications today.

  • continuous delivery (CD)

    Continuous delivery (CD) is an approach for software delivery in which development teams produce and test code in short but continuous cycles to improve software quality.

  • What is a configuration file?

    A configuration file, often shortened to config file, defines the parameters, options, settings and preferences applied to operating systems (OSes), infrastructure devices and applications in an IT context.

  • What is cloud orchestration (cloud orchestrator)?

    Cloud orchestration (cloud orchestrator) is the use of programming technology to manage the interconnections and interactions among workloads on public and private cloud infrastructure.

  • What is compliance automation?

    Compliance automation, also known as automated compliance, is the practice of using technology -- such as applications with AI features -- to perform and simplify compliance procedures.

  • What is continuous monitoring?

    Continuous monitoring constantly observes the performance and operation of IT assets to help reduce risk and improve uptime instead of taking a point-in-time snapshot of a device, network or application.

  • D

    disaggregated server

    A disaggregated server is a server whose components and resources are divided into subsystems.

  • Docker image

    A Docker image is a file used to execute code in a Docker container.

  • What is Datadog?

    Datadog is a monitoring and analytics tool for information technology (IT) and DevOps teams that can be used to determine performance metrics as well as event monitoring for infrastructure and cloud services.

  • What is distributed tracing?

    Distributed tracing is a method used to track the journey of requests as they flow through a distributed system or microservices architecture.

  • F

    friendly name

    A friendly name is a term used to refer to a device, application file, certificate or other IT asset instead of its technical name.

  • What is function as a service (FaaS)?

    Function as a service (FaaS) is a cloud computing model that enables cloud customers to develop applications and deploy functionalities and only be charged when the functionality executes.

  • G

    golden image

    A golden image is a template for a virtual machine, virtual desktop, server or hard disk drive.

  • guest operating system (guest OS)

    A guest operating system is the operating system installed on either a virtual machine (VM) or partitioned disk. It is usually different from the host operating system.

  • I

    IT incident management

    IT incident management is a component of IT service management (ITSM) that aims to rapidly restore services to normal following an incident while minimizing adverse effects on the business.

  • IT incident report

    An IT incident report is documentation of an event that disrupted the normal operations of an IT system or had the potential to do so as well as how the situation was handled.

  • IT monitoring

    IT monitoring is a process that gathers metrics on the operations of an IT environment.

  • IT operations management (ITOM)

    IT operations management (ITOM) is a strategic approach to managing an organization's information technology needs.

  • IT systems management

    Systems management is the administration of the information technology (IT) systems in an enterprise network or data center.

  • What is infrastructure as code (IaC)?

    Infrastructure as code (IaC) is an IT practice that codifies and manages underlying IT infrastructure as software.

  • What is IT automation? A complete guide for IT teams

    IT automation is the use of instructions to create a clear, consistent and repeatable process that replaces an IT professional's manual work in data centers and cloud deployments.

  • What is IT operations (IT ops)?

    The term IT operations (IT ops) describes the many processes and services an IT department manages and maintains within an organization.

  • What is IT service management (ITSM)?

    IT service management (ITSM) is a general term that describes a strategic approach to designing, delivering, managing and improving the way businesses implement IT services.

  • L

    legacy system (legacy application)

    A legacy system is any outdated computing system, hardware or software that is still in use. Legacy systems include computer hardware, software applications, file formats and programming languages.

  • live migration

    Live migration refers to the process of moving a virtual machine running on one physical host to another host without disrupting normal operations or causing any downtime or other adverse effects for the end user.

  • log analytics

    Log analytics is the assessment of a recorded set of information from one or more events, captured from a computer, network, application operating system (OS) or other IT ecosystem component.

  • M

    mean time to detect (MTTD)

    Mean time to detect (MTTD) is a measure of how long a problem exists in an IT deployment before the appropriate parties become aware of it.

  • memory paging

    Memory paging is a memory management technique used to control sharing of memory resources belonging to a computer or virtual machine (VM).

  • mission-critical application

    A mission-critical application is a software program or suite of related programs that must function continuously for a business or business segment to be successful.

  • mutation testing

    Mutation testing, also known as code mutation testing, is a form of white box testing in which testers change specific components of an application's source code to ensure a software test suite can detect the changes.

  • N

    Nagios

    Nagios is an open source IT system monitoring tool.

  • O

    on-demand computing (ODC)

    On-demand computing (ODC) is a delivery model in which computing resources are made available to the user as needed.

  • What is observability? A beginner's guide

    Observability is a management strategy focused on keeping the most relevant, important and core issues at or near the top of an operations process flow.

  • What is orchestration in IT?

    In IT, orchestration is a commonly used term for the automated coordination and management of different processes, systems and tasks.

  • P

    phased rollout

    Phased rollout is a hardware or software migration method that involves incrementally implementing a new system.

  • physical to virtual (P2V)

    Physical to virtual (P2V), also called hardware virtualization, refers to the migration of physical machines to virtual machines (VMs).

  • platform engineering

    Platform engineering is a specialized discipline within software development that focuses on designing, building, maintaining and improving the toolchains and workflows software developers use.

  • R

    What is real user monitoring (RUM)?

    Real user monitoring (RUM) is a type of performance monitoring that records user interactions with a website or application.

  • What is root cause analysis?

    Root cause analysis (RCA) is a method for understanding the underlying cause of an observed or experienced incident.

  • S

    server hardware degradation

    Server hardware degradation is the gradual breakdown of the physical parts of a server.

  • service discovery

    Service discovery is the automatic detection of devices and offered services over a network.

  • ServiceNow

    ServiceNow is a software company that provides a cloud-based, AI-driven platform for automating multiple management workflows in enterprises. The company specializes in IT service management, IT operations management and IT business management.

  • storage pool

    A storage pool is capacity aggregated from disparate physical storage resources in a shared storage environment.

  • systems operator (sysop)

    In IT, a systems operator (sysop) is a person who runs computer servers and other devices on a daily basis in a data center.

  • What is security automation?

    Security automation uses technology to remove high-volume manual processes from security operations to detect cyberthreats, which saves time by integrating different workflows into repeatable processes.

  • What is serverless computing?

    Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model that lets software developers build and run applications and servers without having to provision or manage the back-end infrastructure.

  • T

    Type 2 hypervisor (hosted hypervisor)

    A Type 2 hypervisor is a virtual machine (VM) manager that is installed as a software application on an existing operating system (OS).

  • What is tool sprawl? Explaining how IT teams can avoid it

    Tool sprawl is the accumulation of many IT tools by an organization, leading to inefficiency and data siloing.

  • V

    Virtual Machine Disk format (VMDK)

    VMware Virtual Machine Disk format (VMDK) is a format specification for virtual machine (VM) disk image files.

  • Virtual Machine Management Service

    The Virtual Machine Management service, also known as VMMS or vmms.exe, is the main module in the Microsoft Windows operating system for controlling the virtual machines (VMs) on a Hyper-V server.

  • virtual to physical (V2P)

    Virtual to physical (V2P) involves transferring or porting a virtual machine (VM) onto a physical machine.

  • virtual to virtual (V2V)

    Virtual to virtual (V2V) refers to the migration of an operating system (OS), application program and data from a virtual machine (VM) or disk partition to another virtual machine or disk partition.

  • virtualization

    Virtualization is the creation of a virtual version of an actual piece of technology, such as an operating system (OS), a server, a storage device or a network resource.

  • What is a virtual hard drive?

    A virtual hard drive file is a container file that acts similar to a physical hard drive.

  • W

    What is workflow orchestration?

    Workflow orchestration is the process of coordinating and automating tasks across different systems to ensure they run within a defined workflow.

  • Y

    What is YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language)?

    YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) is a data serialization language used as the input format for diverse software applications.

  • Z

    Zabbix

    Zabbix is an open source monitoring software tool for diverse IT components, including networks, servers, virtual machines (VMs) and cloud services.