Stop. Before you start adding KPIs to your brand new glass table, make sure you’ve done your homework on design principles.

Today, Splunk announced a new milestone release of SignalFx Microservices APM, introducing groundbreaking innovations including: Full Fidelity tracing, AI-Driven Directed Troubleshooting, and open framework instrumentation. With the Splunk acquisition of SignalFx and Omnition now behind us, we’re excited to announce a new, revolutionary release of SignalFx Microservices APM.

These days, cybercriminals are ambitious and innovative, with no shortage of tools and resources at their disposal to go after high-stakes targets and execute malicious code — all while flying completely under the radar. To prepare you for what’s ahead, below are five of the top cybersecurity threats you might encounter in 2020.

In part one, we introduced the duality of observability, controllability. As a reminder, observability is the ability to infer the internal state of a "machine” from externally exposed signals. Controllability is the ability to control input to direct the internal state to the desired outcome. So observability is a loop problem. And we need to stop treating it as the end state of our challenge in delivering performant, quality experiences to our users and customers.

The waves of change are certainly upon us and businesses are being forced to adapt at a record pace. Current world events have caused a jarring shift in all aspects of our lives, accelerating major changes in how we live and work. An unprecedented number of people are now working from home. Those of us working in IT Operations are no exception. Many companies are implementing a Distributed IT Operations Center (D-NOC) approach to address this new reality.

A unified cloud infrastructure data model is fundamental for enterprises using multiple cloud vendors. Enterprise customers prefer to use multiple cloud vendors as a way to prevent being locked in and dependent on specific platforms. According to Gartner the top vendors for cloud infrastructure as a service in the years 2017-2018, are Amazon 49.4%, Azure 12.7% and Google with 3.3%.

You can view mobile-friendly dashboards and interact with augmented reality (AR) visualizations with the Connected Experiences suite of mobile apps. Splunk Mobile, Splunk AR, and Splunk TV allow you to take Splunk data on the go for a secure mobile experience. Below, Ryan O'Connor from the Splunk for Good team shares some examples of how to build mobile-friendly dashboards. Splunk for Good makes machine data accessible and valuable to nonprofit organizations and educational institutions.

The duality of observability is controllability. Observability is the ability to infer the internal state of a "machine” from externally exposed signals. Controllability is the ability to control input to direct the internal state to the desired outcome. We need both in today's cloud native world. Quite often we find that observability is presented as the desired end state. Yet, in modern computing environments, this isn’t really true.

In 2019 multiple cities, hospitals and educational institutions in the U.S. were crippled by ransomware, including Baltimore, Atlanta, New York City, Regis University in Denver and Monroe University in New York. In the the last 12 months, the infosec community has seen these ransomware operators seriously upping their game (see Ryuk ransomware).

Do you like gems? Perfectly cut diamonds? Crystal clear structures of superior beauty? You do? Then join me on a 10 minute read about a quest for hidden gems in your data: graphs! Be warned, it is going to be a mysterious journey into data philosophy. But you will be rewarded with artifacts that you can use to start your gemstone mining journey today.

If you're a cybersecurity leader with decades of experience in the industry, I am sure you've helped your organization navigate major security issues related to remote working. Technology has evolved drastically across the decades, with new attack surfaces emerging with each shift.

As everyone is taking proactive measures to stay healthy, organizations are increasingly having their employees work from home. At Splunk, we are focused on bringing data to every question, decision and action — and remote work for us equals Zoom for online meetings and workspaces. As our customers use Splunk for real-time data processing and analytics, they use our Splunk Mobile App (Android, iOS) when they need to take their dashboards on the go.

One of the practices being thrust into action right now is social distancing. As you would expect, this means millions of people around the world are working from home and this migration in the workforce is going to have a massive impact on the services IT practitioners must monitor and maintain in a virtual-first environment. We are already seeing reports of massive usage surges across tools like Zoom and outages in Microsoft Teams just as the COVID-19 pandemic pushes people to work from home.

As WFH usage surges, an increasing number of users will be connecting from home laptops over the internet into a Citrix server that could be hosted in a data center. This will likely put strains on licensing, internet bandwidth and server performance hosting the Citrix environment. These are all key areas that Splunk can monitor with various add-ons.

Maybe you’re interested in finding out more about deep learning? Maybe your current ML analytics are running too slowly or crushing your CPU and RAM? Or perhaps your boss has told you that they need an AI-based app so they can show off to their boss (who will then brag about it to their boss)?

When it comes to complex application integrations, RED monitoring provides a sensible and necessary common element to see how our systems are performing and to alert us to behavior which is detrimental to your customers and your business goals. So, what is RED? RED stands for rate, errors, duration and is an offshoot of the Google Golden Signals.

With more and more endpoints accessing your network remotely, you should expect rapid increases in VPN connections and usage, as well as exponential usage of cloud-based services. There are numerous Splunk apps that can help you increase the monitoring of remote endpoints but let’s showcase Splunk Security Essentials (SSE).

Right, so now the vast majority of your workforce works remotely. Clearly managing all these inbound VPN connections is on top of mind, but what about other vulnerabilities you should be monitoring for? In addition to the ever increasing number of inbound VPN connections, organizations can expect an increase in the use of SaaS-based collaborative software such as Slack, Dropbox, G Suite, and Trello.

Companies all across the world are responding to the COVID-19 crisis by taking every precaution to limit its impact on the lives of employees and customers. The virus has created a ripple effect impacting everything from a visit to the local grocery store to countless conference cancellations. And the world became aware of this crisis only a little over a month ago. Tech companies have responded by asking, and even requiring, employees to work remotely.

If you haven’t yet heard...Splunk dashboards are new and improved! We released a new dashboard framework as a beta app at .conf19, and have been working hard to improve it since then. This blog post will cover the highest-impact features in the release. For notes on every feature, see the release notes on Splunkbase. To see a run-anywhere dashboard highlighting the key features from this release, copy the JSON definition from our Github.

After Article I of the United States Constitution establishes the legislative power of Congress, it briefly describes the process for determining the number of representatives for each state. That process, called “Apportionment,” is based on the decennial (every 10 years) census — a survey of the population of the nation that gives lawmakers an understanding of the size and composition of the population.