IT Operations Definitions

This glossary explains the meaning of key words and phrases that information technology (IT) and business professionals use when discussing IT operations and related software products. You can find additional definitions by visiting WhatIs.com or using the search box below.

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  • 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).

  • million instructions per second (MIPS)

    Million instructions per second (MIPS) is a measure of a processor's speed, providing a standard for representing the number of instructions that a CPU can process in 1 second.

  • 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.

  • What are ModelOps (model operations) analytics models?

    ModelOps (model operations) is a holistic approach to building analytics models that can quickly progress from the lab to production.

  • N

    Nagios

    Nagios is an open source IT system monitoring tool.

  • NoOps (no operations)

    NoOps (no operations) is a concept that an IT environment can become so automated and abstracted from the underlying infrastructure that there's no need for a dedicated team to manage software in-house.

  • 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.

  • Open Container Initiative

    The Open Container Initiative (OCI) is a collaborative project hosted under the Linux Foundation that is designed to establish common standards for container formats and runtimes.

  • open core model (open core software)

    The open core model is an approach to software development that combines attributes of both the open source and closed source models.

  • 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.

  • P

    paravirtualization

    Paravirtualization is a type of hardware virtualization that enables the guest operating system (OS) in a virtual machine (VM) to access the hypervisor directly, rather than indirectly through a complex abstraction layer, as is the case with conventional full virtualization.

  • 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

    In IT, a platform is any hardware or software used to host an application or service.

  • 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.

  • policy engine

    A policy engine is a software component that allows an organization to create, monitor and enforce rules about how network resources and the organization's data can be accessed.

  • R

    real user monitoring (RUM)

    Real user monitoring (RUM) is a technology used by developers and network operators to gain real-world observability into web performance and service availability.

  • Red Hat Atomic Host

    Red Hat Atomic Host is a variant of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux supported, open source operating system, designed to be a minimal OS with optimizations for container hosting.

  • rolling deployment

    A rolling deployment is the installation of software updates on one server or server subset at a time, rather than updating all servers or server subsets at the same time.

  • root cause analysis

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

  • S

    SaltStack

    SaltStack, often referred to as simply "Salt," is an open source configuration management and orchestration tool for automating repeated system administrative and code deployment tasks.

  • Scalable Processor Architecture (SPARC)

    Scalable Processor Architecture (SPARC) is a 32- and 64-bit microprocessor architecture developed by Sun Microsystems in 1987.

  • server hardware degradation

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

  • 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.

  • service discovery

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

  • service virtualization

    Service virtualization is the process of creating replicas of systems that new applications depend on to test how well the application and systems integrate.

  • 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.

  • shift-left testing

    Shift-left testing is a software testing approach in which the code is tested in the earlier stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

  • sidecar proxy

    A sidecar proxy is an application design pattern which abstracts certain features, such as inter-service communications, monitoring and security, away from the main architecture to ease the tracking and maintenance of an application.

  • site reliability engineering (SRE)

    Site reliability engineering (SRE) is the application of scripting and automation to IT operations tasks such as maintenance and support.

  • software asset management (SAM)

    Software asset management (SAM) is the administration of processes, policies and procedures that support the procurement, deployment, use, maintenance and disposal of software applications within an organization.

  • STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head)

    STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head) is a Linux service for maintaining the integrity of nodes in a high-availability (HA) cluster.

  • 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 a service mesh?

    A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that controls service-to-service communication within a distributed application.

  • What is server virtualization? The ultimate guide

    Server virtualization is a process that creates and abstracts multiple virtual instances on a single server.

  • T

    Terraform

    HashiCorp Terraform is an infrastructure as code (IaC) software tool that allows DevOps teams to automate infrastructure provisioning using reusable, shareable, human-readable configuration files.

  • trusted execution environment (TEE)

    A trusted execution environment (TEE) is an area on the main processor of a device that is separated from the system's main operating system (OS).

  • 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).

  • V

    virtual

    In computing, the term virtual refers to a digitally replicated version of something real, whether it's a machine, a switch, memory or even reality.

  • virtual appliance

    Considered a software equivalent of a hardware device, a virtual appliance (VA) is a preconfigured software solution.

  • virtual machine (VM)

    A virtual machine (VM) is an operating system (OS) or application environment installed on software that imitates dedicated hardware.

  • 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 private server (VPS) or virtual dedicated server (VDS)

    A virtual private server (VPS), also called a virtual dedicated server (VDS), is a virtual server that appears to the user as a dedicated server, but that is actually installed on a computer serving multiple websites.

  • virtual switch (vSwitch)

    A virtual switch (vSwitch) is a software program that enables one virtual machine (VM) to communicate with another.

  • 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.

  • VM BIOS (virtual machine basic input/output system)

    A VM BIOS (virtual machine basic input/output system) is the set of instructions that controls the booting process of a VM.

  • What is a virtual hard drive?

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

  • W

    WebAssembly

    WebAssembly (Wasm) is a binary instruction format for compiling and executing code in a client-side web browser.

  • X

    Xen

    Xen is the open source hypervisor included in the Linux kernel and, as such, it is available in all Linux distributions.

  • Y

    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.

  • zero-touch provisioning (ZTP)

    Zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) is a method of setting up devices that automatically configures the device using a switch feature.

  • ZeroOps

    ZeroOps is when developers spend zero time working with infrastructure and operations, instead spending all their time and creative energy on software product development.