Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

To our SCOM Community – thank you for making the first worldwide virtual SCOM event such a huge success! As co-hosts of SCOMathon 2020 that took place last week, we are happy to have provided a platform for the SCOM community to get together, learn and connect.

Since almost the beginning of programming, the idea of write-once and deploy everywhere, on all platforms, has been an unreachable ideal to minimize development costs for cross-platform applications, drive UI consistency and reduce security service area. In programming, the cross-platform languages Java and Python have topped developer utilization charts for decades.

When the Coronavirus pandemic hit and the world went into lockdown, as many as one-half to one-third of workers in the United States began working from home full-time. Some people have loved it, but others have felt lonely, unproductive, and stressed while working from home with kids. As we’ve learned more about the virus and states have published reopening plans, many knowledge workers in the U.S. are ready (or being asked) to return to work.

If you are anything like us here at Sematext, you are likely always trying to automate any tedious, repetitive tasks. Repetitio est mater… boringdorum. Setting up monitoring falls in that category. You either do it manually every time you provision a new piece of infrastructure or service, or you automate it. Note that by “service” I mean either an instance of your own application or something like Nginx or Elasticsearch or MySQL or …

You’ve pored over the MongoDB documentation, crafted highly polished and well-tuned queries, and confidently deployed your new code to production. Everything ran great at first, but once CPU or RAM usage hit a certain point, your queries suddenly slowed to a crawl. What happened, and how can you prepare for situations like this in the future? This is an unfortunate but common scenario with databases like MongoDB.

Machine Learning (and deep learning) applications are quickly gaining in popularity, but keeping the process agile by continuously improving it is getting more and more complex. There are many reasons for this, but primarily, behaviors are complex and difficult to anticipate, making them resistant to proper testing, harder to explain, and thus not easy to improve.

Alien wavelengths are commonplace today. Here a transponder pair from one optical system vendor connects to, and transmits over, the optical line system (OLS) – constituting fixed/reconfigurable multiplexer and amplification elements primarily – from another vendor. (While it can be technically feasible to pair transponders from different vendors, typically this is not done for commercial and operational reasons.)

Some, maybe. But not most. Look, I have this theory. I also have data. And as with most stories in my life, it all starts with a trip to Las Vegas. In 2017, I attended my first AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. For a while I heard how re:Invent was either a “cloud” or a “developer” event. I now believe neither to be true. Most people I met at re:Invent were operations folks. They were there to learn about monitoring and managing applications running in AWS.

You have management software that you’ve used for your Linux or Windows servers. Can’t you just deploy a Linux agent and monitor a VMware vSphere/ESX server, or a Windows agent to monitor a Microsoft Hyper-V server? This is a very common question that comes up in any discussion on VMware monitoring and virtualization management. After all, when a VMware ESX server boots, the administrator gets to a Linux login prompt and can login to a Linux operating system.

SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) is a kind of software whose purpose is to provide organizations and corporations with useful information. “About what?” you may wonder. Well, about potential security threats related to your business networks. SIEM does this through data collation and by prioritizing all kinds of dangers or threats. In general, we already answered the question “what is SIEM?”, but how does it do it?