Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

How to prove your HAProxy build is legitimate

On September 4, Rapid7 Labs published research on a Linux espionage toolkit found at two organizations in South Korea. The centerpiece is a backdoor the researchers call "Ted," which was hidden inside a modified HAProxy build running on the victims' load balancers. Rapid7 attributes the campaign to North Korean state-sponsored actors with medium confidence. The same toolkit tampered with multiple tools across the victims' systems, including an SSH keylogger.

How to Find and Fix Packet Loss Before It Reaches Your Users

Why do the same complaints about call quality and slow file transfers keep coming back after the network has been checked and declared healthy? Packet loss is usually the answer, and it survives investigation because it degrades the services people use without taking anything offline. That combination makes it expensive. Equipment gets rebooted, cables get replaced, and tickets go to the internet service provider, often with nobody knowing which segment of the path is discarding traffic.

What Is Network Design? Steps and Best Practices for Growing Networks

Most networks were never designed. They were extended, one switch and one VLAN at a time, until a single core failure took the site down and nobody could find the diagram. According to the Uptime Institute Annual Outage Analysis 2026, 57 percent of organizations said their most recent major outage cost more than $100,000. Network design is how you stop paying that bill. You decide the network topology, the addressing and the hardware on purpose, before the cabling goes in.

On-Call Alerting vs. Mass Notification: What's the Difference?

When an urgent situation occurs, organizations need more than a way to send a message. They need a communication strategy that considers who needs to receive the message, whether they need to take action and how quickly they need to respond. This is where the difference between on-call alerting and mass notification becomes important. A critical IT incident, for example, may require an immediate response from a specific on-call engineer or incident response team.

Building Sentry's Laravel AI Integration

During a recent Agent Hackweek, an internal Sentry event that gives us a week to build any AI or agent project we want, a colleague pitched me on writing the Laravel AI integration. The goal was to give agents built with Laravel AI the same Agent Tracing support we already have for other frameworks. I liked the idea, he built Sentry’s Agent Tracing for Python based agents before which meant he already had domain knowledge.

Perplexity pricing in 2026: Free vs. Pro vs. Max, and who should pay

Perplexity pricing runs $0 for Free, $20 a month for Pro, and $200 a month for Max, with enterprise seats listed from $40 per user. Pro fits most people who search for work daily. Max exists for heavy automation. The prices are verified against Perplexity's live plans page as of September 2026. When Perplexity published a customer quote on its own pricing page, it chose an unusual one.

Build vs. buy: should you build your own AI cost management tooling?

Build when the problem is narrow (one provider, one team, simple attribution) and the tooling is strategically yours to own. Buy when AI spend spans providers, arrives untagged, and needs unit costs finance will trust, because that build is a multi-quarter platform project with a permanent maintenance tail. Price both paths in engineer-years before deciding. CloudZero sells the “buy” side.

Creating Secure and Reliable Digital Signing Processes

Digital signing works best when it is designed as part of a complete business process. Organizations building signing into their own software can evaluate an esignature API from Blueink, a provider focused on developer-led document workflows with REST API tools, SDK resources, embedded signing, webhooks, tracking, and identity-verification options. Its services are relevant to integrated workflows in areas including government, insurance, education, and healthcare. A signature request is only one moment in a longer journey.