If you’ve ever worked with SCOM then you’ll know it needs a little love to get the most out of it. Together with Tao Yang MVP, I co-presented a session called “20 Operations Manager Tips in 20 Minutes” at Experts Live USA this year which brings together many of the SCOM tips and tricks we’ve accumulated over the years. That session wasn’t recorded, so we decided to publish the tips here for everyone to benefit from. It’s time to get your SCOM game on.

As you well know, many organisations are now moving to Office 365 in either a hybrid environment (Exchange on premise with Office 365 integration) or full cloud capacity. Yet, Microsoft still remains unable to provide much detail on how issues or outages impact your resources specifically – it's just not enough to know that globally "Some users or tenants may be affected". Your business needs to know if users are suffering and what proportion are impacted.

Welcome to Part Two of our two-part series on REST APIs. Now that you’ve learnt all about what REST APIs are and how they work, let’s have a look at how you can get the most out of your REST APIs. We will illustrate this through the example of integrating Squared Up with the ServiceNow REST API.

A question we often get asked is: What exactly is a REST API, and how does it work? While APIs have long had their place in basic developer lexicon, their growing importance to all IT professionals is becoming hard to ignore. The growth in the number of APIs increased by its fastest ever rate in 2019 and, as a consequence of this API explosion, there are now over 22,000 publicly available APIs (according to leading online journal ProgrammableWeb).

This blog post is for anyone needing a jumpstart into the world of Kusto. Perhaps you’ve heard about Kusto and are just curious. Maybe you’re just starting to use Azure Monitor for your application monitoring. You might even be getting skilled up in anticipation of the new Squared Up for Azure release that will have KQL at its heart. Whatever your reason, set aside the next 10 minutes and we'll get you up to speed with KQL. Ready? KQL stands for Kusto Query Language.

We are delighted to announce the availability of Squared Up version 4.3, continuing our approach of bringing you frequent updates to the product. Version 4.2 was released just two months ago, and 4.1 two months before that. Each new release brings bug fixes, quality improvements and in this case some cool new features too. For a demo of these new features take a look at the webinar 'Squared Up – v4.3 Release'.

At Squared Up we frequently get asked about Citrix monitoring and dashboards, especially by customers who aren’t paying for the premium ‘Citrix Platinum’ license and so don’t have access to SCOM management pack from Citrix. That’s why we were very excited to hear that there is a new SCOM management pack for monitoring Citrix.

I am delighted to announce a big new initiative that we have been working on here at Squared Up. Our engineers have been working their socks off to build a new product, Squared Up for Azure, and it’s shaping up very nicely. It’s not ready for you to play with quite yet, but we plan to have an early release available for enthusiastic testers in late September (sign up below!).

On my first day as Content Writer at Squared Up, I walked into the orange and blue-themed office and immediately took a liking to my surroundings. It was bright, it smelled fresh – and I distinctly remember noticing that all the meeting rooms were Star Wars-themed. Warmly welcomed by the friendliest of colleagues, I was shown to my desk, where waiting for me was a Star Wars LEGO set alongside company merch as a welcome gift.

On May 22nd, more than 8,500 people gathered online for Microsoft’s long-anticipated Windows Server Summit (WSS) – the annual virtual event that covers the latest and greatest in all things Windows Server. It is where industry experts announce and demo exciting new technologies every year – and we are happy to share that this year, Squared Up’s Windows Admin Center (WAC) extension has earned a spot on the list, plus the Microsoft stamp of approval.