Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Business leaders frequently need to make decisions that could impact the entire future of a company. Armed with pages of data and financial reports, many executives choose to slash costs, double efforts on certain products over others, or otherwise forge ahead with major decisions about cloud usage, spending, and overall business strategy. Great choices could mean huge profits, but unwise choices could spell doom for the business as a whole.

As digital services have become increasingly important to businesses and organizations, reducing downtimes and service disruptions have become critical objectives for business operations. This means management reporting and KPI’s are now crucial to quality management, providing the insight to let you improve incident remediation over time.

How long will you support your device? Long-term support for IoT is a simple but difficult question for many device manufacturers. If you are developing a smart home device, a mobile robot for hospitality, or the next iron man jetpack, you need to consider how long you will support the device on the market. This will have implications on your operational expenses, team resources and customer satisfaction. Simply put, the longer you support your device, the happier your user will be.

Another month has come to a close, so I’m back again to take you through what’s new and noteworthy from the month of September. If you missed last month’s blog, this will be a monthly recurring series to keep you posted with the latest and greatest at Honeycomb. There’s a ton to cover, so I’ll dispense with the preamble and dive right in.

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an internet protocol that is used to collect information about network devices and manage them. Most of the modern devices connected to a network support SNMP, such as routers, switches, servers, printers, and more. There are three different versions of SNMP (v1, v2, and v3). It most commonly operates on UDP ports 161 and 162. The most common versions being used are v1 and v2. The data can be collected from a network device through SNMP via polling.

As platform engineering continues to rise in popularity, there is a new side effect to watch out for: the people using the internal developer platforms aren't the people who built it. They’re not necessarily familiar with the codebase, they may not know what's powering it behind the scenes – and the platform might even have to contend with malicious users. So how is Puppet evolving to contend with this new challenge?

For the last few years, Squadcast has been building out a market-leading on-call and alert management solution. Over the past few quarters, we have significantly enhanced our on-call product by releasing and improving features related to Incident Response - including Slack / MS Teams integration, Runbooks, Postmortems, Service Level Objectives, and Status Pages. We believe that a reliability platform involves both on-call and incident response - one cannot work effectively without the other.

Did you know Halloween isn’t the only event in October ready to send shivers down your spine? Each year, October is “National Cybersecurity Awareness Month” in the U.S. and “European Cybersecurity Month” in Europe. So, before we dress up as ghosts, vampires, or whatever, let’s have a quick look at some old and new cyber risks to be aware of and how to deal with them.

You can take a wide range of actions to nurture a culture of cybersecurity in your organization. Some of them can be directed to your employees - and include initiatives like password management and phishing training - and others are related to strategy to adopt towards cybersecurity risk. That's where the NIST cybersecurity framework comes in (as well as other best practices such as CIS controls).

With so many apps to choose from, mobile users no longer have much patience for apps that don’t work well. This isn’t just about bugs and crashes; users also think about how fast the app works and how much battery it uses. But have you ever thought about what would happen to the business if your live applications running on the client’s systems went down or didn’t work as expected?