Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

What are MAC addresses? What are they for and how to find them?

At the shadow of the widespread IP addresses, MAC addresses say even more about our devices than its more popular sister. As a kind of “identity document for network devices”, a MAC address informs us about “who is who” when connecting to a network. Of course, remember that the one called “MAC” has nothing to do with Macintosh computers. In fact, you can find it on devices of any brand.

IoT monitoring with Grafana: How Eurac observes climate change in the Alps

In 2014, the Mazia (Matsch) research site in the Italian Alps was officially accepted as a Long Term Socio Ecological Research LT(S)ER site. The monitoring infrastructure is operated by Eurac Research and the University of Bolzano and consists of 24 automatic microclimatic stations in a mountain ecosystem across an elevation gradient ranging from 1,000 m to 2,700 m, logging several meteorological and biophysical variables every 15 minutes.

Hacked! Solve the Dreaded DevOps Problem With This

Hacks that make headlines are painful for everyone involved, but with some clever preparation and web monitoring at your side you can avoid the worst of this pain. Those who have been victimized face a steep uphill battle to reclaim trust and authority. Unwitting victims, like customers and end users, suffer downtime or leaks containing personally identifiable information. If your eye is not on security, your organization is inviting these kinds of attacks.

Case Study: How Railway Corporation Unleashed Economies of Scale with Motadata

Motadata enabled a railway corporation, with headquarters in Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, under the brackets of Ministry of Railways to monitor, analyze and resolve IT operational issues to establish a centralized modern infrastructure in their project. The project is one of the India’s most ambitious railway projects that runs through coastal western India, linking Mumbai to the western region of Goa and Mangalore. It covers about 170 railway stations under its remit.

Adding even more uptime check locations to Oh Dear

We're starting this new year strong with an additional new 8 locations to check your websites from! We've just finished adding uptime capacity in the following locations. That's 8 new locations to configure any website monitoring from! In all our previous locations, we've increased our server capacity to support our continued growth.

Scale Your Prometheus Metrics Indefinitely with Thanos

Prometheus metrics are an essential part of your observability stack. Observability comes hand in hand with monitoring, and is covered extensively here in this Essential Observability Techniques article. A well-monitored application with flexible logging frameworks can pay enormous dividends over a long period of sustained growth, but Prometheus has a problem when it comes to scale.

Is CloudWatch Really Cost Efficient?

One of the keys to CloudWatch’s success is its no bang, no buck billing system. The pricing structure has been designed from the outset to ensure that CloudWatch users only pay for what they actually use. In addition, the CloudWatch Free Tier allows first time users to test the waters without shelling out. The downside of this flexibility and adaptability is complexity.

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is Still Relevant

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behavior. SNMP exposes management data in the form of variables on the managed systems organized in a management information base (MIB), which describe the system status and configuration.

Steps for Developing IT Organization Strategies for Your Business

Does your IT department perform re-actively to problems as they occur or are they proactive, attempting to head off problems before they occur? Sadly, many IT departments are reactive because they lack the proper IT organization strategies to use technology and apps to become proactive. Taking a reactive approach is ineffective and affects productivity and the potential growth of your business.