Welcome to the new world, my friends. Now that working from home is our new reality, we've found that many of our customers are taking a much closer look at the technology that binds us all together and allows us to access corporate resources: the humble VPN. In the spirit of enablement, I’ve put together a quick list of dashboards that can help add that extra bit of visibility for our faithful Splunk Enterprise Security customers.

Stop. Before you start adding KPIs to your brand new glass table, make sure you’ve done your homework on design principles.

Today, Splunk announced a new milestone release of SignalFx Microservices APM, introducing groundbreaking innovations including: Full Fidelity tracing, AI-Driven Directed Troubleshooting, and open framework instrumentation. With the Splunk acquisition of SignalFx and Omnition now behind us, we’re excited to announce a new, revolutionary release of SignalFx Microservices APM.

These days, cybercriminals are ambitious and innovative, with no shortage of tools and resources at their disposal to go after high-stakes targets and execute malicious code — all while flying completely under the radar. To prepare you for what’s ahead, below are five of the top cybersecurity threats you might encounter in 2020.

In part one, we introduced the duality of observability, controllability. As a reminder, observability is the ability to infer the internal state of a "machine” from externally exposed signals. Controllability is the ability to control input to direct the internal state to the desired outcome. So observability is a loop problem. And we need to stop treating it as the end state of our challenge in delivering performant, quality experiences to our users and customers.

The waves of change are certainly upon us and businesses are being forced to adapt at a record pace. Current world events have caused a jarring shift in all aspects of our lives, accelerating major changes in how we live and work. An unprecedented number of people are now working from home. Those of us working in IT Operations are no exception. Many companies are implementing a Distributed IT Operations Center (D-NOC) approach to address this new reality.

A unified cloud infrastructure data model is fundamental for enterprises using multiple cloud vendors. Enterprise customers prefer to use multiple cloud vendors as a way to prevent being locked in and dependent on specific platforms. According to Gartner the top vendors for cloud infrastructure as a service in the years 2017-2018, are Amazon 49.4%, Azure 12.7% and Google with 3.3%.

You can view mobile-friendly dashboards and interact with augmented reality (AR) visualizations with the Connected Experiences suite of mobile apps. Splunk Mobile, Splunk AR, and Splunk TV allow you to take Splunk data on the go for a secure mobile experience. Below, Ryan O'Connor from the Splunk for Good team shares some examples of how to build mobile-friendly dashboards. Splunk for Good makes machine data accessible and valuable to nonprofit organizations and educational institutions.

The duality of observability is controllability. Observability is the ability to infer the internal state of a "machine” from externally exposed signals. Controllability is the ability to control input to direct the internal state to the desired outcome. We need both in today's cloud native world. Quite often we find that observability is presented as the desired end state. Yet, in modern computing environments, this isn’t really true.

In 2019 multiple cities, hospitals and educational institutions in the U.S. were crippled by ransomware, including Baltimore, Atlanta, New York City, Regis University in Denver and Monroe University in New York. In the the last 12 months, the infosec community has seen these ransomware operators seriously upping their game (see Ryuk ransomware).