Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The fierce competition existing in the market today is a result of the numerous choices available for customers. All they need is a click to switch brands. It’s that simple. Traditionally, product and price were the two elements that gave businesses a competitive edge. This is no longer the case. Increasingly, customers are valuing experience more than product and price. A recent study shows that customer experience is surpassing product and price in brand differentiation.

By now, we’re all fairly aware that the ongoing crisis has changed the way people work. Businesses around the globe have adopted the remote working model. Many jobs today are compatible with remote working, with business-critical applications readily accessible through the internet. However, not all applications deployed in an organization are available through the internet. Some of them are available only on the business’ LAN due to security concerns.

We’re happy to announce that Cortex v1.0 has been released! The horizontally scalable, durable, and fast Prometheus implementation is now generally available for production use. At Grafana Labs, we’ve been using Cortex in production for almost three years, including to power the Prometheus backend for the Grafana Cloud managed logging and metrics platform.

At Squadcast, we use Grafana and absolutely love it! This blog post talks about how you can use your Grafana data to set off alert triggers in Squadcast. Turbocharge your observability data in Grafana by making it actionable.

Microservices and containers have taken the tech industry by storm. Kubernetes is one of the tools that has evolved to manage these new aspects of software development. It is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. One of the biggest challenges that organizations face when adopting Kubernetes is performing monitoring tasks in this dynamic environment.

Coronavirus has disrupted daily life for so many around the world in a shockingly short span of time. Lifestyles have shifted. A new normal, albeit a panic-stricken one, has set in. One-third of the global population is under lockdown to slow the spread of coronavirus. Many organizations have adopted temporary work-from-home measures to keep themselves up and running.

The COVID-19 virus epidemic has seen a 23% rise in visitors to UK independent ecommerce sites and similarly, on a global scale, many companies have transitioned to fully ecommerce-based business practice and are seeing an increase in online shoppers. Additionally, employees are either remote working, self-isolating or ill. This pivot in business continuity means websites are increasingly vulnerable to being attacked.

Today I’m excited to announce Fleet, a new open source project from the team at Rancher focused on managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters. Ever since Rancher 1.0 shipped in 2016, Rancher has provided a central control plane for managing multiple clusters. As pioneers of Kubernetes multi-cluster management, we have seen firsthand how users have consistently increased the number of clusters under management.

We’ve heard from many of our customers and prospects that they love Rancher but just don’t have the staff and expertise to operate the platform. Figuring out the compute, storage and networking architecture can be a challenge. Performing upgrades, backups and troubleshooting can also be time consuming. Monitoring the environment and knowing when to scale up or down, horizontally or vertically, is yet another thing to worry about.

Our ServiceNow Discovery Connector extends your ServiceNow discovery sources into SCOM, allowing you to leverage the rich management pack discoveries and wide SCOM agent deployment to populate your CMDB with everything from servers and devices to databases, clusters, and services. All with no extra agents, so you are up and running in minutes not months! Our latest version also brings with it some new features.