Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We’ve noticed interesting threads floating around the internet asking how would you explain serverless to a toddler. As it happens, we just turned three years old and to mark the occasion, we decided to take up the challenge and wrote a bedtime story, for serverless enthusiasts of all ages, about how serverless came to be, from the very beginning. It is a magical tale of the ingenious, life-changing journey that got us to a new universe called Serverless.

Still counting on passwords to protect your workstation? When set up properly, alternatives to passwords provide a streamlined user experience while significantly improving security. These alternative authentication methods can also easily be combined to create a custom and adaptive authentication profile.

For IT teams it has never been an easy task to build and maintain an inventory of all the systems, software and hardware that organizations are reliant on to deliver their services and do something meaningful for the business with this information. As organizations grow they accumulate more and more asset and config data. Information inevitably ends up scattered across multiple, disconnected repositories; ITSM tools, service catalogs, software asset management systems, databases, spreadsheets etc.

At Splunk, we’re proud to employ some of the top security analysts in the industry. On any given day, they’re investigating security incidents, triaging alerts and identifying threats so our systems and data — as well as those of our customers — remain secure. But what, exactly, do Splunk security analysts do? And what are some of their biggest challenges?

The wait is finally over. The first episode of our weekly podcast series aimed to alleviate all your remote work hassles is out. The efficacy of remote operations depends on a robust virtual private network (VPN). VPNs help facilitate remote work by acting as a conduit between an organization’s remote workers and its private network. VPNs ensure a safe passage for the transmission of business-critical data and grants end users access to on-premises services to maintain operational continuity.

Things have been busy with the Loki project! Once again, we waited too long between releases, and there are so many new things I won’t be able to list them all. But that won’t stop me from trying, so let’s get to it. For a change of pace, instead of listing interesting PRs, I’m going to talk through Loki’s components and mention the changes in more of a paragraph style. Let’s see how this goes.

IT monitoring is a complex field with several approaches to manage monitoring and alerts. Most of the current monitoring solutions provide Static Threshold-Based alerting, where IT Operations staff are notified when resource utilization breaches the defined threshold. The problem with Static Thresholds is that these are manually adjusted, and tuning it to meet the specific environment and needs of an organization is a major challenge for IT Operations teams.

One of the big problems we hear about with Azure is managing costs and understanding where the money is being spent. In fact, when we launched SquaredUp for Azure back in 2019, the ability to visualize costs quickly became one of the most popular features. It helped our customers (and ourselves, too) get a grip on Azure costs – by making it easy to identify under-utilized resources and take the appropriate action to reduce costs.

Using a Linux Domain controller such as Red Hat Identity Management or FreeIPA? If so then the fields are a bit different than some other LDAP interfaces, which makes it difficult for some to connect to for authentication. Here is a quick how-to on setting up Puppet Enterprise with authentication from FreeIPA. I am assuming that you already have Puppet Enterprise installed with eyaml configured. If not, then you may want to visit these prerequisites.

This blog explains a peculiar issue faced when Azure Durable Functions are deployed using Azure DevOps. In case you need to know what Azure Durable Functions are, please refer to Microsoft’s documentation on Durable Functions here as the explanation of it, is not under the scope of this blog. Durable functions work best when built with versions .NET Core 2.2 and above. After developing and testing a durable function, it can be deployed to Azure in many ways.