Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Free online Elastic Stack and Elasticsearch training: Anytime, anywhere, on-demand

We are offering a variety of on-demand Elastic training courses for free — featuring 11 titles that span observability, security, and Elastic Stack administration. If you haven’t tried one of our self-paced courses yet, now is the perfect time to find out why so many people have shifted their learning preference from in-class to online. Our on-demand courses provide the same immersive learning experience found in the classroom, but delivered in a convenient, remote environment.

Closer Look: Observability

As enterprise IT systems have become more complex and distributed due to cloud infrastructure, containers, serverless technology, an ever-growing footprint of applications and devices, IoT, SDN, open source development tools and more, the practice of performance monitoring has become far more nuanced. In these modern IT environments, traditional monitoring practices centered on known issues aren’t enough.

6 Common Mistakes in AWS EC2 and Azure Cloud VM Optimization

No matter what’s driving your move to an AWS or Azure cloud, two things are true. One, you don’t want to under-provision, which could create performance and availability issues. And two, you don’t want to overpay, because no one ever wants to do that. One of the key decisions you must make is which Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure virtual machine instance configuration you need. It’s a scoping exercise, but several factors make this easier said than done.

Remote Working: Encrypt 15k Devices in 3 Days? No problem.

Right now, millions of people are working remotely for the first time, and they’re doing so on company laptops and mobile devices. And with millions of these devices now offsite, this throws but one more wrinkle in tech support’s security plans—in addition to worrying about insecure networks and malware attacks, IT must also safeguard against physical theft. Yes, device encryption is the logical fail-safe for such a scenario and a must-have for any remote IT setup.

What is an Ubuntu LTS release?

Come April 23rd 2020, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will be available. It will be the first LTS version of Ubuntu since the 18.04 release, and in this blog, I want to answer the common question, what is an LTS? For a deeper look at the benefits of using an Ubuntu LTS, there’s a whitepaper for that, for anything else, this post will answer your questions.

Understanding and Baselining Network Behaviour using Machine Learning - Part I

Managing a network more effectively has been something our customers have been asking us about for many years, but it has become an increasingly important topic as working from home becomes the new normal across the globe. In this blog series, I thought I’d present a few analytical techniques that we have seen our customers deploy on their network data to: Better understand their network and Develop baselines for network behaviour and detect anomalies.

Understanding and Baselining Network Behaviour using Machine Learning - Part II

A difficult question we come across with many customers is ‘what does normal look like for my network?’. There are many reasons why monitoring for changes in network behaviour is important, with some great examples in this article - such as flagging potential security risks or predicting potential outages.

Colonel Mustard in the Library with Microservices APM

As many of us are rediscovering an interest in board games, it feels relevant to make reference to Hasbro’s classic Clue. Understanding what’s going right or wrong in your sprawling digital business can feel a lot like a murder mystery: it was the authentication service in the east region with the memory exhaustion error. This analogy has a weakness when applied to modern operations. The Clue board game had 6 weapons, 6 suspects, and 9 rooms. That’s 324 combinations.

Sharing Code Dependencies with AWS Lambda Layers

The use of Serverless execution models is expanding extremely rapidly and cloud providers are continuing to enhance their platforms. Per Flexera’s “State of the Cloud” report: Leading this trend for the last two years, Amazon has released a few features that address AWS Lambdas’ pain points and make them a more feasible choice for large scale deployments consisting of numerous applications.