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Earlier this month, we announced a rebrand to meshIQ and in this blog we will highlight the reasons behind the rebrand and what you can expect going forward.

Where We Have Come From

Nastel has been at the forefront of some major technological innovations in the middleware messaging management sphere. We have been managing complex enterprise-level application stacks and providing single-pane-of-glass monitoring, alerting and analytic tools that allowed businesses to understand what was happening to messages deep inside their message queues and brokers. Nastel has simplified how businesses interact with their messaging middleware, with sophisticated tools reporting and visualizing what was once unreadable machine data in ways that allow for smarter business decision-making in real-time.

Where We are Going

As meshIQ, we are looking to build on our illustrious past and move on to the next stage in our evolution as a company and deliver solutions for broader messaging needs. Our new name signifies our expanded focus on broader Integration MESH.

MESH stands for Messaging, Event Processing, and Streaming infrastructures deployed across Hybrid-cloud.

Messages follow a pre-configured path, using queueing technologies like IBM MQ, MSMQ etc.

Events are broadcast using a pub/sub model. A broker usually routes the events to destination.

Streaming technologies like Kafka deliver high speed data streams using persisted data.

Hybrid is essentially where these platforms are hosted on-premises, Cloud or both.

IQ points to the fact that this is the smartest way businesses can handle all their data streaming and messaging infrastructure management in one place. Our purpose-built single-pane-of-glass architecture allows for full observability of the integration MESH.

On Becoming meshIQ

Taking Aim at the Future

Sometimes you have to aim big to make the kind of impact that you would like, and this is something that we have never been afraid to do at Nastel Technologies. In the next evolution of our company, we are looking to “cross the chasm” between the expectations of DevOps professionals and the current generation of Application Performance Management systems on the market.

We aim to solve the most significant problems faced in the industry today with the same vigor and verve that has always been associated with our company.

In the last decade, the complexity of Integration platforms has increased, and DevOps professionals need a solution to manage and deploy complex configurations when building apps that use Messaging, Event Processing or Streaming technologies. Additionally, they want the ability to observe the performance of their app and rollback configurations if needed.

Ideally, they want a single pane of glass to manage and monitor the complex M/E/S landscape and speed up the Mean-Time-To-Resolution (MTTR) to better deliver on Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and improve the overall user experience. 

What Does meshIQ Look Like?

Data is the backbone of any enterprise, and the messaging and streaming technologies form the central nervous system enabling apps and platforms critical for IT and the business. With the meshIQ platform, we are proud to be able to offer what we would describe as “observability platform for an organization’s digital nervous system”.

This platform will deliver DevOps, monitoring, management, and intelligence for the MESH.

Many vendors treat integration infrastructure like a black box, whereas we offer unparalleled observability and governance oversight. We complement APM platforms by delivering visibility and management of the black box.

What’s Next?

If you are an existing customer, our products will continue to work as you have known them. As you use our support apps and documentation, you will notice the new brand and new URLs. Over the next several months, we will have some exciting announcements in the following two areas.

So, stay tuned.

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Integration is a fundamental part of any IT infrastructure. It allows organizations to connect different systems and applications together in order to share data and information. As organizations become more complex and interconnected, they need to ensure they have complete observability and monitoring of their integration architecture. This is essential in order to discover, understand and fix any issues that can arise. Nastel’s complete observability & monitoring of integration infrastructure gives 360° Situational Awareness®

Background

The need for having a complete observability & monitoring of integration infrastructure solution has been driven by the increasing number of integration services, systems, architectures and applications being used by enterprises. It is now necessary to have a comprehensive view of the entire integration ecosystem to avoid issues with data availability, latency, reliability and performance.

Observability & Monitoring

Complete observability & monitoring of integration infrastructure is essential in order to ensure continuation of operations and prevention of system outages. It is important for organizations to be able to have visibility into the performance and reliability of their integration infrastructure. This requires a combination of tooling and practices, such as logging, metrics, tracing, alerting and visualization. Nastel Navigator provides visibility into the entire integration environment.

Logging

Logging is one of the most important aspects of observability & monitoring. Logs should be collected and stored in a centralized location. They should be clearly labeled and easily accessed. Logs can capture all the necessary information in order to properly track the performance of the infrastructure.

Metrics

Metrics are essential in order to understand the performance of the integration infrastructure. Metrics are collected, stored and monitored in order to be able to analyze changes in the environment. Metrics should be collected from the applications and infrastructure in order to properly track performance.

Tracing

Tracing is also essential for understanding the flow of data through the system. It is important for organizations to understand where data is being received, processed and stored. Traceability helps organizations identify and pinpoint any issues that may arise.

Alerting

Alerts allow organizations to be notified of any issues with the integration infrastructure. Alerts should be configured to notify administrators of any changes in the environment, including changes in performance or reliability.

Nastel is honored to receive a total of 18 prominent badges across multiple categories as High Performers in the Winter 2023 report by G2.

G2 is the world’s largest and most trusted software review platform marketplace. More than 80 million people use G2 to make smarter software decisions based on authentic peer reviews. Quarterly, G2 highlights the top-rated solutions in the industry, as chosen by the source that matters most: our customers.

Nastel has been recognized with the following Winter 2023 awards:

Nastel was also voted #1 for the best support in MQ and Configuration Management for 2 quarters in a row (Fall and Winter).  This means that we had the highest support ranking than any product within that category in winter 2023. 

Voted #1 for Best Support (2 consecutive quarters)

Leaders

High Performers

Nastel’s Highlighted Reviews

Here’s what recent customers had to say about Nastel this year:

Nastel provides leading-edge tools to improve the management and monitoring of key enterprise infrastructure products like IBM MQ and Kafka. Nastel is in a class of its own, no competitors’ products providing the level of value that Nastel provides

– Art R, Sr IT Solutions Architecture Consultant

I needed a new way to monitor the performance of the environment based on our middleware. I’ve been looking for a solution that would allow me to see a complete overview of the entire system and in a fast, accurate and efficient way Nastel has helped me achieve it. The integration with IBM MQ is very good and the truly powerful capabilities of their data management is a huge pro for Nastel Autopilot. Through this comprehensive ecosystem monitoring, We was able to provide detailed reports to directors and the investors, seamlessly and easily with the ability to move data across the platform is excellent.

– Abeer M, Lead Data Analyst

The Navigator tool is extremely powerful and provides great granularity of control for users. For admins it makes it very easy to manage these. I have not found any other tools which provide this level of access control.

– Paul M, Senior Middleware Engineer

We sincerely thank all of our customers for taking the time to share their valuable experiences with us on G2. As we strive to deliver the best products and services, your feedback is extremely important to us.

Our awards and the methodology placed behind it

G2 scores products and vendors based on reviews gathered from our user community, as well as data gathered from online sources and social networks. They apply a unique algorithm to this data to calculate the customer Satisfaction and Market Presence scores in real time.

To read additional reviews for yourself, check out Nastel on G2.

You can log into My.G2.com to dive into the Winter 2023 Reports here.

Observability is a term that has gained a lot of traction in recent years, particularly in the realm of software engineering and DevOps. At its core, observability refers to the ability to gain insight into the internal workings of a system by observing its external outputs. This allows engineers to diagnose and troubleshoot issues with the system, as well as to monitor its performance and behaviour.

However, despite its importance, there are a number of myths and misconceptions about observability that can lead to misunderstandings and misunderstandings about what it is and how it works. In this article, we will take a closer look at some of these myths and dispel them, as well as discuss the three pillars of observability that are essential for effective monitoring and troubleshooting.

Myth #1: Observability is the same thing as monitoring

One of the most common misconceptions about observability is that it is the same thing as monitoring. While monitoring certainly plays a role in observability, it is not the whole picture. Monitoring refers to the process of collecting data about a system, such as metrics and logs, and using this data to track the system’s performance and behaviour. Observability, on the other hand, goes beyond just collecting data and involves using this data to gain insight into the internal workings of the system.

Myth #2: Observability is only relevant for large, complex systems

Another myth about observability is that it is only relevant to large, complex systems. In reality, observability is important for any system, no matter how simple or small it may be. Even a simple web application with a handful of microservices can benefit from observability, as it can help engineers to diagnose and fix issues with the system quickly.

Myth #3: Observability is only for production systems.

Some people think that observability is only relevant for systems that are running in production and that it is not necessary for development or testing environments. However, observability is just as important in these environments, as it allows developers and testers to understand how their code is behaving and to identify and fix issues before they are deployed to production.

Myth #4: Observability is only about metrics and logs

While metrics and logs are undoubtedly important for observability, they are not the only aspects of a system that need to be monitored. In order to gain a complete understanding of a system, engineers also need to be able to observe the system’s behaviour, as well as its internal state. This requires a combination of different data types, including metrics, logs, and traces.

This article originally appeared on yusuf-tayman.medium.com. To read the full article, click here.

Analysts and end users have sought data observability for years, but a recent shift has changed how business processes use these tools, leaving organizations with plenty to consider when selecting which tool is best to use and if commercial investment is worth it.

Observability tools have traditionally focused on capturing and analyzing log data to improve application performance monitoring and security.

Data observability turns the focus back on the data to improve data quality, tune data infrastructure and identify problems in data engineering pipelines and processes.

“Data analysts and business users are the primary consumers of this data,” said Steven Zhang, director of engineering at Hippo Insurance. “But it’s becoming increasingly common that data engineers, who produce this data alongside product engineers, are also struggling with it.”

This calls into question the trustworthiness of the data in terms of accuracy, reliability and freshness. This is where data observability tools come into play.

A good data observability tool captures these problems and presents them in a clean structure. It helps consumers understand conceptually where the data went wrong and helps engineers identify the root causes.

There are many open source and commercial tools for organizations implementing data observability workflows. Commercial tools can fast-track this process with pre-built components for common workflows and offer plenty of vendor support. They also include better support for important enterprise use cases like data quality monitoring, security and improved decision-making. “A modern data infrastructure is often a combination of best-in-class but disjointed set of software environments that requires to be monitored and managed in a unified manner,” said Sumit Misra, vice president of data engineering LatentView Analytics, an analytics consultancy. For example, when a data job fails in an environment, another seemingly unrelated data environment must know and react to the job’s failure.

Observable, responsive and self-treating data flows are becoming essential for businesses. Commercial data observability tools can help organizations accelerate their time to deliver value from data quality initiatives, particularly when they are small or employ more business talent than IT talent, Misra said.
What to look for in a data observability tool Enterprises often end up deploying more tools than required or incorporating tools that are not specific or relevant to their business cases. "Investments in commercial data observability tools and initiatives need to be made from the perspective of the overall business, internal users and customers," said Alisha Mittal, a vice president in IT services at Everest Group. Investments in commercial data observability tools and initiatives need to be made from the perspective of the overall business, internal users and customers. More tools do not always mean higher visibility. In fact, at times, these tools increase the system's complexity. Enterprises should strategically invest in observability tools by examining their current architecture, IT operations landscape and the skill development training and hiring required to handle the tools. Various data quality and security functions are conventionally performed by the data teams of an organization. However, the value of data observability tools lies in how these activities fit into the end-to-end data operations workflow and the level of context they provide on data issues. Enterprises should consider how different data observability functions align with the following data quality management processes, Mittal said: Alerting produces alerts/notifications both for expected events and anomalies. Tracking provides the ability to set and track specific data-related events. Logging keeps a record of events in a consistent way to facilitate quicker resolution.

This article originally appeared on 7wdata.be. To read the full article, click here.

Deploying software to support the work of an enterprise is an increasingly complex job that’s often referred to as ‘devops.’ When enterprise teams started using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to more efficiently and collaboratively run these operations, end users coined the term AIOps for these tasks.

What is AIOPS (artificial intelligence for IT operations)?

AI can help large software installations by watching the software run and flag any anomalies or instances of poor performance. The software can examine logs and track key metrics, like response time, to evaluate the speed and effectiveness of the code. When the values deviate, the AI can suggest solutions and even implement some of them.

There are several stages to the process:

AIops is growing in complexity as teams deploy algorithms to a variety of enterprises. One of the most valuable opportunities comes when organizations start to use other AI algorithms in daily operations. In these cases, AIops can help with deploying AI.  This way, there can be synergy between the software layers.

This article originally appeared on codeopinion.com. To read the full article, click here.

As we settle into the time of year when we reflect on what we’re thankful for, we tend to focus on important basics such as health, family and friends. But on a professional level, IT operations (ITOps) practitioners are thankful to avoid disastrous outages that can cause confusion, frustration, lost revenue and damaged reputations. The very last thing ITOps, network operations center (NOC) or site reliability engineering (SRE) teams want while eating their turkey and enjoying time with family is to get paged about an outage. These can be extremely costly — $12,913 per minute, in fact, and up to $1.5 million per hour for larger organizations.

To understand the peace of mind that comes with avoiding downtime, however, you have to have endured the pain and anxiety that comes with outages first-hand. Here are a handful of the horror stories ITOps pros are thankful to avoid this season.

A case of janky command structure

One longtime IT pro was on a shift with three others as 7 p.m. rolled around. The crew received an alert about a problem impacting the front-end user interface for its global traffic manager device. Thankfully, there was a runbook for it housed in a database, so it appeared the problem would be resolved quickly. One of the team members saw two things to type in: A command and a secondary input. He typed in the commands and, based on the way the runbook looked, was waiting for the command line to ask for an input, such as “what do you want to restart?”

The way the command structure was set up, if you didn’t provide an input, the device itself would restart. He typed in what he thought was the correct command — “bigstart, restart” — and the entire front-end global traffic manager was taken down.

Just as a reminder, this took place in the early evening. The customer was a finance company, and the system went down just around the time when businesses were closing and trying to do their books and other finance-related tasks. Terrible timing, to say the least.

Five minutes into the outage, the ITOps team realized what happened: The tool they used for their runbook used text wrapping by default, so what looked like two separate commands was actually just one. Even though the outage was relatively short, it came at a critical time and created a chain reaction of headaches. The lesson learned? Ensure your command structure is optimized.

This article originally appeared on codeopinion.com. To read the full article, click here.

SUFFOLK, VA — November 21, 2022: Intellyx, the first and only analyst firm dedicated to digital transformation, today announced that Nastel has now won the 2022 Digital Innovator Award.

As an industry analyst firm that focuses on enterprise digital transformation and the leading-edge vendors that are driving it, Intellyx interacts with numerous innovators in the enterprise IT marketplace.

To honor these trailblazing firms, Intellyx’s 2022 Intellyx Digital Innovator Awards puts a spotlight on vendors worth watching.

Intellyx bestows this award upon vendors who make it through Intellyx’s rigorous briefing selection process and deliver a successful briefing.

“At Intellyx, we get dozens of PR pitches each day from a wide range of vendors,” said Jason Bloomberg, President of Intellyx. “We will only set up briefings with the most disruptive and innovative firms in their space. That’s why it made sense for us to call out the companies that made the cut.”

For more details on the award and to see other winning vendors in this group, visit the Fall 2022 Intellyx Digital Innovator awards page.

Principal Analyst & CMO, Intellyx. Twitter: @bluefug

IBM Integration Bus was one of the first messaging middleware applications to be developed and it has gone through many iterations to reach the stage we are at today with App Connect Enterprise. Like any software application, it has become more feature-rich as time has passed and each iteration has marked a new milestone in the capabilities that it has delivered. We will trace some of the evolutionary paths of IBM Integration Bus to see how it came to be where it is today.

IBM Integration Bus (IIB) – Inception

IBM Integration Bus was originally known as MQSeries Integrator (MQSI) when it was launched in 2000. Versions of MQSI ran up to version 2.0. The product was added to the WebSphere family and re-branded ‘WebSphere MQ Integrator’, at version 2.1, being rebranded again as WebSphere Message Broker in the mid-2000s. It was one of the first messaging middleware platforms that allowed businesses to connect disparate applications together and exchange data between them in a reliable and efficient manner.

In 2013, IBM decided to rebrand WebSphere Message Broker as IBM Integration Bus and added a host of new features that saw new nodes added including the Decision Services node which enabled content-based routing of message requests based on rules and parameters. This offered more control over the way the integrations interacted with each other than ever before.

In 2018, IBM decided to rebrand IBM Integration Bus once more as App Connect Enterprise. The new name was chosen to reflect the product’s expanded capabilities, which now included not only ESB functionality but also application development and API management.

The key features that have been added to IBM Integration Bus over the years include:

– Support for more transport protocols: In its early days, WebSphere Message Broker only supported the TCP/IP protocol. However, it now supports a wide range of transport protocols including HTTP, JMS, MQTT, and IBM MQ.

– Improved performance: The latest versions of IBM Integration Bus have been optimized for performance, offering up to 50% faster message processing times than the previous generation.

– Enhanced security: Security has always been a key concern for businesses when exchanging data between applications. IBM Integration Bus provides various security features such as encryption, authentication, and authorization to ensure that data is protected while in transit.

– Greater scalability: IBM Integration Bus can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, and it can scale up or down to meet the changing needs of your business.

App Connect Enterprise has come a very long way since its humble beginnings as MQSeries Integrator. It is now a robust and feature-rich platform that provides businesses with the ability to connect disparate applications together and exchange data between them in a reliable and efficient manner.

Start Optimizing Your Integration Infrastructure with meshIQ!

App Connect Enterprise – And Beyond?

ACE is the newest iteration of IIB and offers several improvements over its predecessor. The first and perhaps most notable of these is that ACE is designed to work with more modern application development frameworks such as Node.js and AngularJS. This allows businesses to easily develop new applications that can integrate with their existing system using ACE.

Another key improvement in ACE is its support for containerized deployments. This means that businesses can now more easily deploy and manage their integration solutions in a cloud environment. Cloud-based computing is the direction of travel for the industry and streamlining cloud integration can help save on costs and increase efficiency.

ACE also offers a new graphical user interface that makes it easier to design and deploy integration solutions. The new GUI can help save time and reduce complexity for businesses that are looking to implement an ACE solution.

Overall, the latest version of ACE provides many improvements and new features that can benefit businesses of all sizes.

How Does ACE Compare to Competitors?

IBM actually has its own competitor to ACE and this is IBM API Connect, which is more tightly focused on the integrations with different data sources. API Connect offers more in the way of tools for security, adding authentication and/or authorization to all APIs, bundling APIs together, enforcing rate limits and quotas etc. It is widely assumed within the industry that at some point ACE and API Connect will be bundled into a single software solution.

Another competitor is Mule from Mulesoft and this is well-suited to Rest API development. According to user reviews, many developers who extensively use Rest APIs believe that it is one of the best solutions for this particular aspect of middleware management and outstrips ACE in this regard.

Others believe that Mule can make for difficult and overly complicated coding, necessitating better help and support solutions. ACE definitely stands the test of time against most major competitors, which isn’t surprising given the ongoing software development from IBM, one of the largest computing companies in the world.

Is ACE Still Relevant in the Modern Age?

ACE is still an excellent tool to manage your integrations and it can be improved upon further by using the  meshIQ infrastructure management platform. This provides a single pane of glass to manage ACE, IIB, MQ and the related application infrastructure for configuration, and observability showing the status of the entire system in real-time, cutting down on the number of false-alarm alerts and providing secure self-service configuration management and management at scale.

The ability for seamless monitoring in real-time can take a lot of the guesswork and time out of managing complex systems spread across cloud environments and will give your teams unparalleled oversight and control over all aspects of the integrations. The ability to detect, monitor and rapidly resolve any anomalies makes the use of the Nastel i2M platform a no-brainer and a potentially huge money-saver for any business group that works with messaging middleware.

One of the building blocks of messaging is, you guessed it, messages! But there are different kinds of messages: Commands and Events. So, what’s the difference? Well, they have very distinct purposes, usage, naming, ownership, and more!

Commands

The purpose of commands is the intent to invoke behavior. When you want something to happen within your system, you send a command. There is some type of capability your service provides, and you need a way to expose that. That’s done through a command.

I didn’t mention CRUD. While you can expose Create, Update, and Delete operations through commands, I’m more referring to specific behaviors you want to invoke within your service. Let CRUD just be CRUD.

Commands have two parts. The first is the actual message (the command), which is the request and intent to invoke the behavior. The second is consumer/handler for that command which is performing and executing the behavior requested.

Commands have only a single consumer/handler that resides in the same logical boundary that defines and owns the schema and definition command.

Commands can be sent from many different logical boundaries. There can be many different senders.

To illustrate this, the diagram below has many different senders, which can be different logical boundaries. The command (message) is being sent to a queue to decouple the sender and consumer.

Commands & Events: What's the difference?

A single consumer/handler, that owns the command, will receive/pull the message from the queue.

When processing the message, it may interact with its database, as an example.

Commands & Events: What's the difference?

As mentioned, there can be many senders, so we could have a completely different logical boundary also sending the same command to the queue, which will be processed the same way by the consumer/handler.

Lastly, naming is important. Since a command is the intent to invoke behavior, you want to represent it by a verb and often a noun. Examples are PlaceOrder, ReceiveShipment, AdjustInventory, and InvoiceCustomer. Again, notice I’m not calling these commands CreateOrder, UpdateProduct, etc. These are specific behaviors that are related to actual business concepts within a domain.

Events

Events are about telling other parts of your system about the fact that something occurred within a service boundary. Something happened. Generally, an event can be the result of the completion of a command.

Events have two parts. The first is the actual message (the event), which is the notification that something occurred. The second is the consumer/handler for that event which is going to react and execute something based on that event occurring.

There is only one logical boundary that owns the schema and publishes an event.

Event consumers can live within many different logical boundaries. There may not be a consumer for an event at all. Meaning there can be zero or many different consumers.

To illustrate, the single publisher that owns the event will create and publish it to a Topic on a Message Broker.

Commands & Events: What's the difference?

That event will then be received by both consumers. Each consumer will receive a copy of the event and be able to execute independently in isolation from each other. This means that if one consumer fails, it will not affect the other.

Commands & Events: What's the difference?

Naming is important. Events are facts that something happened. They should be named in the past tense which reflects what occurred. Examples are OrderPlaced, ShipmentReceived, InventoryAdjusted, and PaymentProcessed. These are the result of specific business concepts.

This article originally appeared on codeopinion.com. To read the full article, click here.