Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For MSP business owners, figuring out how to improve your bottom line is like an ongoing game of tug of war. Do you raise your rates or do you make your service staff more productive? Raising rates may seem like the easier option, but at the risk of upsetting existing clients and losing prospects to competitors with better rates, it may not be your best bet. Instead, you should focus on improving service efficiency and productivity within your MSP.

Though much of the coverage of artificial intelligence or AI has been hype, the technology itself is real enough – and gaining traction in the commercial sphere. In fact, AI is increasingly being viewed as an integral requirement for business IT setups, rather than a luxury or fad. The research firm Gartner, Inc., predicts that more than 30 percent of data centers that fail to sufficiently prepare for AI will no longer be operationally or economically viable by 2020.

Whether you need a VPN for Torrenting, streaming, or safe usage of public Wi-Fi networks, you may be off-put by the price tag. After all, why do you need to pay upwards of 8 dollars a month for something as basic as changing your IP address once in a while? The good news is you don’t have to. There are tons of free VPN options, and the ones you see on this list will cover most of your basic needs.

Everywhere you look, digital transformation initiatives are taking hold across the enterprise. Customer service is no exception. Today, new digital technology options mean customers expect choice, flexibility, speed, transparency, and personalization from the companies they do business with—expectations that are only increasing.

Basware is known for delivering leading edge financial software that cuts costs, increases efficiencies, and reduces risks to an enterprise’s global operations. They help customers simplify operations and spend smarter by automating procurement and finance processes. What makes their offerings world-class is both the capabilities they provide and the way they provide them.

Recently we released a new SNMP Trap input plugin in Telegraf 1.13. I’d like to tell you more about that plugin and how you can use it.

Recently, our good friends at Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched an awesome new product, VPC Traffic Mirroring. Here at Splunk, we are excited about this new capability as it allows our Splunk Stream platform to ingest this data, and send it on to any Splunk instance, in the cloud or on premises. Leveraging this capability allows Splunk users to collect specific network data from their AWS environment, and use it to fulfill security, IT Ops, or business-focused use cases.

In this tutorial, we will talk about how different Java Garbage Collectors work and what you can expect from them. This will give us the necessary background to start tuning the garbage collection algorithm of your choice. Before going into Java Garbage Collection tuning we need to understand two things. First of all, how garbage collection works in theory and how it works in the system we are going to tune.

Grafana by default uses sqlite3 as a local database to hold the configuration information (such as users, dashboards, alerts, etc.). But did you know you can also use other databases for this purpose? Many large customers prefer to use either Postgresql or MySQL/MariaDB, and we recently had a request from a company wanting some help to migrate their configuration data from Postgresql to MySQL. This is not a common request, so we didn’t have any pre-existing tooling to do it.

One class of support requests I get at Healthchecks.io is about occasional failed HTTP requests to ping endpoints (hc-ping.com and hchk.io). Following an investigation, the conclusion often is that the failed requests are caused by a packet loss somewhere along the path from the client to the server. The problem starts and ends seemingly at random, presumably as network operators fix failing equipment or change the routing rules.