The year 2020 was a tough one and tested the grit and resilience of the human race. Organizations across the globe had to prioritize the safety of employees, customers, and associates. The rapid response to COVID-19 has enabled millions to work remotely because of advanced cloud computing technologies supplied through public cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

2020 was a whirlwind of a year that took all of us by surprise. As we transitioned to working from home and virtual meetings, we reorganized our priorities, listened to your feedback and requirements, and worked around the clock to deliver a hassle-free monitoring experience. Here's a quick recap of the features we rolled out last year, and a brief note on our plans for 2021.

2020 has definitely been new, different, strange, unpredictable, and more. With new normal becoming a buzzword, adapting and surviving through these challenging times has been quite a task. We, at Site24x7, prioritized the safety of our employees, their families, and all our customers and business associates at the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19). At the same time, customer queries and their feature requests were handled to manage the sudden surges in demand for existing and new features.

Compared to other years, 2020 has been a lot different in every single aspect; from how we all interacted to how we operated, everything changed. It was the year where the adjective "unprecedented" was overused. As the world embraced remote work policies, the only thing that remained unchanged was the fact that we operated uninterrupted and our customer support kept churning out replies to customers’ questions. It was business as usual for us.

Though remote work has been in practice for a decent number of years, the pandemic has made businesses take up the challenge of shifting to a completely remote workforce. All this wouldn't have been possible without high-speed internet access for all employees. Another tool that has made the transition smooth and ensured uninterrupted communication is Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

Work remains work, regardless of the location. Working remotely has become the new normal, but some organizations have started to return to their office workspaces, albeit with a minimal workforce. Though going back to work may not be as difficult as adapting to remote work instantly, certain operational challenges are unavoidable; for example, monitoring workspace infrastructure is nothing new, but managing different locations simultaneously has yet to become customary.

Microservices and distributed architectures have become the norm for building modern day applications. While the cloud has made it easier to deploy and scale microservices, it has opened up a complex set of problems for DevOps by virtue of the sheer volume of interactions between those services.

Log files, which are the records of everything that has happened in your server, application, or framework, are generally unfiltered and huge. Going on for pages, these plain text files are packed with tons of information and are the initial go-to place for any troubleshooting. However, the challenge lies in reading, understanding, and interpreting log files, and ultimately pulling out the right piece of information required for analysis.

All storage devices, whether on-premises or in the cloud, are used to store or maintain data in a server. To organize files based on usage and perform read/write operations, the disk is divided into separate portions called partitions. A partition can contain the entire disk space or some of it. Disk usage gives the amount of space used by the storage device to read/write an operation.

HTTP, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, is a communication protocol used by your browser to connect to the web server of the site you're looking for. When HTTP data transfer between the browser and the web server is shared via unencrypted hypertext, anybody connected to your network can intercept the data you're transferring. To combat this, it's best to switch to HTTPS, the more secure extension of HTTP. You can't verify data integrity with HTTP