Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

With the growing popularity of cloud computing, security incidents related to it have been on the rise. Logs are indispensable resources for countering these threats, and they can be utilized for alerting, taking remedial action, and even preventing future attacks. In this post, we will examine ways to better secure cloud-native applications using logs.

Over the past several months we’ve been focused on improving observability and operations workflows for Compute Engine. Today, we are excited to share the first wave of these enhancements are now available. These include: Significantly improved operating system support for the Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging agents. The ability to rapidly deploy, update, and remove agents to groups of VMs, or all of your VMs, by policy, with as little as a single gcloud command.

Cloud Monitoring has always provided comprehensive visibility and management into individual Compute Engine virtual machines (VMs). But many Google Cloud customers have hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of VMs that they need to manage. Cloud Monitoring now gives you zero-config, out-of-the-box visibility into your entire Compute Engine VM fleet, with quick access to advanced Monitoring features such as installing the Cloud Monitoring agent and configuring fleetwide alerts.

Many customers we have are hybrid – meaning they have both Azure and on-prem estate, and subsequently both SquaredUp for Azure and SquaredUp for SCOM deployments. In other cases, some customers are using multiple different deployments of a product, for example for multiple SCOM management groups or multiple Azure tenants.

HashiCorp Packer is a free and open source tool for creating golden images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer makes it easy to codify VM images for Microsoft Azure. In this blog post we’ll look at how to use HashiCorp Packer and Puppet Bolt to define our VM templates in code.

During code review, static image files might not be adequate when a developer wants to demo their changes. Starting now, teams can attach any type of file to a pull request. No need to worry about the file size either. For example, “before and after” screen recordings can be uploaded and viewed directly in a pull request. With this change, Bitbucket Cloud has become more integrated with the Atlassian ecosystem. Does your team also collaborate on Jira or Confluence?

Box is a leader in Cloud Content Management, providing users easy access to their information and a secure platform to share and collaborate. Box delivers its cloud-based product via web applications, integrations with partner solutions such as Microsoft Office 365 and G Suite, and publicly exposed and supported APIs that enable customers and partners to integrate Box into their systems. As with any SaaS application, performance, reliability, and availability are critical to the business.

If you have ever had the need to store large amounts of files and data, then Azure’s Blob Storage is made for you. Microsoft’s Azure Cloud provides huge benefits with not only their fantastic services, locations, availability and support, but also in their almost seemingly infinite capacity. Azure Blob Storage is not only scalable, durable and almost always available it also provides flexibility to scale as your business requirements need.