Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

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 …

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.

People throw the terms “availability” and “uptime” around a lot, but depending on what you’re monitoring, the definition of these terms may change. In this article we use the narrow definition, accessible, to explore the various options Uptrends has for checking availability on websites, APIs, and servers.

The larger an enterprise becomes, the more systems and applications there are to monitor, and the more scalable its monitoring system has to be to keep up with business growth. This is the challenge that RingCentral — which provides cloud-based communications and collaboration solutions for businesses — faced and solved.

Monitoring — by its very nature — requires privileged access to internal and external services. In order to safely maintain visibility into critical systems, it’s vital to have some form of secrets management to manage authentication credentials (AKA, "secrets"), including passwords, keys, APIs, tokens, and any other sensitive pieces of information in your IT infrastructure.

Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL, is a global security standard technology that is being adopted by a number of different organizations across the globe. Essentially, SSLs are small data files containing a cryptographic key. This key carries important information about the organization using it. Around 600,000 websites have installed SSL certificates for security.

Did you know that around 306 billion emails have been sent globally every day in 2020 and about 45 percent of all emails received are spam. Even more surprisingly, websites that are marked as spam on email portals lose 95 percent of their traffic. Email servers tend to blacklist certain IDs as spam based on their content. And for companies marketing their business via emails, 36 percent of the total spam messages across the globe are attributed to advertising content.

Edge computing is likely the most interesting section of the broader world of IoT. If IoT is about connecting all the devices to the Internet, edge computing is about giving more processing power to devices at the edge. Edge computing views these edge devices as mini clouds or mini data centers. They each have their own mini servers, mini networking, mini storage, apps running on top of this infrastructure, and endpoint devices.