Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Network hardware failures. Internet outages. DDoS attacks. These are the types of disruptions you probably spend your time preparing to handle. But there’s another potential source of trouble that most IT pros think about much less frequently, and which happens far more often: employee offboarding. Whether an employee is leaving to pursue another opportunity or an employee is being terminated, you need to make sure your company’s network and data are secure.

Like many in IT, I am a big fan of Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). It’s one of those tools that you can’t really go without: it can help locate your company’s servers, desktops and mobile devices; it helps install client software, patch updates (see Microsoft Patch Tuesday); and it protects your endpoints and access control tools. All good things, but… Sometimes our beloved SCCM needs a little backup—like Robin to Batman.

Earlier this year, we shared the certified Ansible Collection for Sensu Go, which makes it easy to automate your monitoring and achieve real-time visibility into auto-scaling infrastructure. Now that Sensu Go 6 has been released, we’ll share the latest updates on the Collection, including the management aspects of Sensu Go 6, with a focus on the structure of Ansible playbooks in the Sensu Go 6 world.

The main focus for cybersecurity teams — moving beyond compliance — is to deliver the level of security required to manage the likelihood of a breach and the potential impact to the business. This is more effective than simply focusing on the cost of delivering security services.

It seems almost everything is going digital during this pandemic: businesses, education, and medical consultations. This increased digital consumption is squeezing the juice out of the IT infrastructure of many organizations. On top of that, remote work policies are posing serious security issues. At times like these, IT infrastructure monitoring is like a football game for IT admins, except: So how do you navigate all these challenges and score a touchdown?

Set up custom error pages in HAProxy to ensure consistent, branded messaging that supports any backend web stack. The memory is probably still fresh: You’re shopping online at your favorite website, looking for something specific, you’ve got it narrowed down to two or maybe three products, you make the final decision, click to checkout and then— Internal Server Error. A cryptic error has replaced the page you were expecting. More than surprised, you feel knocked off balance.

Amazon S3 is a highly-scalable object storage system. Amazon S3 can contain any number of objects (files), and those objects can be organized into “folders”. However, to S3, folders don’t really exist. huh? That’s right. “Folders” are a human concept, applied to S3 keys for organizational purposes. But they’re nothing special to S3 itself. Before we begin, forget everything you know about the S3 Management Console.

Have you ever looked at SCOM on User Voice - Microsoft’s way of collecting feedback on what end users have to say about SCOM and its future? Well good news, the top 2 items are going to be addressed! At Ignite 2020 - System Center session, Dianna Marks (SCOM Product Marketing Manager) told us Microsoft have heard your feedback and will be taking action.

What range should I use with rate()? That’s not only the title of a true classic among the many useful Robust Perception blog posts; it’s also one of the most frequently asked questions when it comes to PromQL, the Prometheus query language. I made it the main topic of my talk at GrafanaCONline 2020, which I invite you to watch if you haven’t already. Let’s break the good news first: Grafana 7.2, released only last Wednesday, introduced a new variable called $__rate_interval.

A hosted status page gives you the peace of mind that users can always answer one simple question: is it up or down. Hosted status pages work because they offer third-party confirmation your services are up. If your site goes down, the third party is likely not down and you can use them to refer to your status. Status pages are your personal 24 hour news cycle. Regardless of if you’re up or down, customer service fields fewer support tickets, and users praise your transparency.