WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) is an actual standard to access and/or control Windows components, services and applications. With its query language (resembling the SQL used by many relational databases), WMI allows collecting information from multiple sources, so-called providers. However, this comes at a cost: running WMI query is a resource- and time-consuming operation (comparing to certain alternatives).

Nowadays, many people, even those far from IT industry, depend on remote conferencing services, either on premises, or global ones. Unless the status of those services is watched, its unexpected absence can disrupt upcoming meetings, causing all kinds of negative consequences. Let us provide a brief list of several remote conference services along with means to monitor their status and availability.

With current global crisis spreading into multiple areas of information technologies, it is crucial to learn how are the security-related areas affected, and what it would mean for the entire IT industry. Remote access to network resources results in both increased load on new and existing tools allowing performing most activity remotely (to grasp the possible scale of impact: read, for example, about recent Zoom service controversies).

It’s no secret that information threats appear in numbers nowadays. It may be time to refresh some typical rules, tested by years of practice worldwide, to make your monitoring setups as up-to-date as possible. None of these rules are cast in iron; they are all flexible enough to adapt to any given environment. What matters is underlying idea; the implementation is what makes them suitable for custom needs.

Current world situation forces many a people to work remotely – e.g., from home. While it is the safest approach to diminish possible risks to health, there are information security risks and challenges appearing in the wake of the trend. Working remotely can be tricky; especially when we talk about a network and/or system administrator work. What’s worse, administrator’s access shouldn’t be interrupted, putting the entire setup at stake.

Remote access to intranets and otherwise restricted areas was always a challenge. On one hand, it’s desirable to re-create convenient and familiar access to the same resources; on the other hand, there are many issues, starting from ensuring security and access reliability The same is related to monitoring. If a network’s devices should be monitored, there always should be access to them; thus, there’s a separate task of monitoring accessibility. Below are several guidelines.

To make sure no site content is modified or intercepted en route, HTTPS protocol is used (this is currently a must; using HTTP, insecure version, is strongly discouraged). Different versions of so called “transport security layer” protocol, known as TLS, can be used to provide the mentioned secure data exchange.

Simple Network Management Protocols, SNMP, refers to protocols family used to probe and control various network devices. It includes three protocol versions (v1, v2c, v3), all of those supported by IPHost Network Monitor. SNMP is a popular means of watching network devices of any kind (nowadays literally every device with an IP address can support SNMP); however, there are typical problems users can encounter when using SNMP-enabled devices in local or global network.

Security monitoring is a constantly changing area; the threats can appear at any moment; when there are so called 0-day threats, there are quite few techniques available to efficiently prevent an unknown yet type of problem. However, there are typical behavior patterns that can be detected using well-known pieces of software and monitor types. Most techniques mentioned below are related to Unix-like systems; however, exactly the same approaches can be used for every operating system.

Monitoring is typically viewed as informative service: when a problem arises, messages are being sent, to alert people in charge to detected problems. However, IPHost Network Monitor allows creating composite alerts, including several so-called simple actions (such as “send mail”, “display pop-up” and so on). These simple actions can be used to proactively react to certain failure conditions – not only to inform of them, but also take measures to handle the actual issues.