Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Entra ID is the new name for Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Microsoft’s cloud-based identity and access management service. This rebranding, announced in July 2023, is part of Microsoft’s broader Entra product family, which focuses on securing access to digital resources and managing identities in a comprehensive way.

On February 25, 2025, at 11:32 AM EST, Martello’s Vantage DX monitoring began alerting on an issue affecting Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD SSO). While Microsoft had not yet acknowledged the incident, online reddit forums had noted the issue and our Vantage DX proactive monitoring detected disruptions impacting authentication across multiple workloads. See here the critical warning for Exchange in Vantage DX Monitoring. Here is the critical warning for OneDrive and SharePoint in Vantage DX.

AWS NAT Gateways are essential for private subnet access but can quickly become a costly burden, even when idle. With Kentik, cloud and network engineers gain deep visibility into NAT Gateway traffic, allowing them to identify underutilized gateways, analyze high-cost usage, and explore cost-saving alternatives like VPC Endpoints, Internet Gateways, or direct peering.

Grafana’s extensibility has always been one of the keys to its success. It comes with a wide range of data sources that allow you to query your data no matter where it lives, visualizations to help you quickly make sense of that data, and apps that can provide complete observability solutions, all in a single package.

2024 was a huge year for Apache DataFusion, and 2025 is looking to be even bigger. The project officially became a top-level Apache Software Foundation project, achieved best-in-class performance for querying Parquet files in the ClickBench benchmark, and had a research paper accepted for SIGMOD.

Logstash is a powerful tool for ingesting, transforming, and shipping data from various sources. Visibility into Logstash is critical for optimizing performance and troubleshooting issues related to data ingestion. We’ve greatly improved the Logstash integration to display the status of your Logstash nodes and pipelines at a glance. The integration is now powered by Elastic Agent, which queries Logstash monitoring APIs for data that populates managed dashboards.

In the log aggregation game, the biggest difficulty you face can be setting up parsing rules for your logs. To qualify this statement: simply getting log files into Graylog is easy. Graylog also has out-of-the-box parsing of a wide variety of common log sources, so if your logs fall into one of the many categories of log for which there is either a dedicated Input; a dedicated Illuminate component; or that uses a defined Syslog format; then yes, parsing logs is also easy.

Previously, I discussed the challenges of adopting AI in enterprises, focusing on middle managers’ concerns about its impact on their roles. In case you missed it, you can read it here: AI resistance isn’t where you expect it In this post, I’ll highlight the crucial steps for ensuring successful AI adoption. All business transformations are complex by nature because they change the organizational balance – that is, the equilibrium of power held among different leaders.