2017 was a bad year for fires in California. The Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County in October destroyed whole neighborhoods and sent toxic smoke south through most of the San Francisco Bay Area. The Air Quality Index (AQI) for parts of that area went up past the unhealthy level (101–150) to the hazardous level (301–500) at certain points during the fire. Once word got out that N99 dust masks were needed to keep the harmful particles out of the lungs, they became a common sight.

Every job has its mundane administrative tasks, and we all hate them. In the world of wealth management, relationship managers are pressured to serve as many existing customers and prospects as they can with the ultimate goal of increasing the assets under management (AUM)—one of the key metrics used to measure their productivity. Similarly, in the insurance industry, financial advisors are driven to maximize their time with clients.

We’ve been on a roll this year with Beelines, our integrations for quick, easy, and automagic instrumentation of your apps. You may have already seen our Node.js, Ruby, and Go beelines – today, we’re excited to announce the release of the Honeycomb Beeline for Python!

This functionality was frequently requested by our users and now we finally have it - automated synthetic monitoring using real browser! It allows you to periodically simulate user interaction with you web application by entering form fields, submitting forms, clicking links and buttons, etc. For list of currently available browser commands please visit our "Quick reference" section.

Companies today can’t afford to have an application succumb to a spike in traffic or fail due to an overload of user requests. Two of the key benefits of cloud computing today are elasticity and scalability, both of which help ensure an application’s optimal performance.

We here at Uptime.com strive to be on the cutting edge of downtime monitoring across the web. While our tool provides valuable insights into a website’s speed and global uptime, this month the focus was on big brands with huge customer bases. Every outage seemed to affect millions of customers in the US or across the globe.

Believe it or not, there is a difference between incident closure and incident resolution. Incident closure ensures a problem has been addressed. Comparatively, incident resolution goes a step further by ensuring an incident is closed and all stakeholders are satisfied with the end results and agree with the incident closure.

DevOps is no longer just about breaking the silo between developers and operations. That’s why every manual operation in your delivery pipeline needs to be evaluated to determine if it can be automated. Database changes are indeed a tedious process and therefore deserve to be considered in your DevOps implementation.

Network Monitoring is essential for every network administrator. It determines how effective your IT team is at solving problems or even completely eliminating them. Even small organizations need visibility of what is happening within their network environment. This includes the ability to know what is happening with their servers, network infrastructure and the traffic that flows across the network and all connected network devices.

Netmon’s complete Network Monitoring Solution can also be used as a centralized SYSLOG and Windows Event Log Server where you can quickly look through many Servers, Workstations or other Network devices’ SYSLOG and Event Log information without having to log into each individual device to see the same information.