Downtime occurs. It's an unfortunate fact of online life. No website is able to provide 100% uptime - even tech giants like Google suffer downtime, albeit very occasionally. So, some amount of downtime is inevitable, but how much is acceptable? This question is obviously subjective - downtime that's acceptable for one person may be intolerable for another. Therefore, we undertook a little research...

Today, we released version 2.0 of the Skylight Agent. 2.0 doesn't introduce any new APIs, but we did rewrite the SQL Lexer to support more varieties of queries. We also spent a lot of time on internal refactoring and improved our error logging. Since we follow semantic versioning, we also took the opportunity to drop support for some older dependencies and environments. Read on for more information about upgrading as well as some technical details on our internal changes.

We’ve added a new feature we think you’ll want to hear about—Single Sign-on. Uptrends is now compatible with Single Sign-on. Single Sign-on (SSO) is a great way to easily manage user accounts, improve productivity, and improve security, and now you can use SSO with Uptrends.

In part one of the OpenTracing blog series we provided a good OpenTracing overview, explaining what OpenTracing is and does, how it works and what it aims to achieve. One of the key aspects of OpenTracing is that it is vendor neutral, and also that OpenTracing is just a specification. In order to instrument an application via OpenTracing API, it’s necessary to have an OpenTracing-compatible tracer correctly deployed and listening for incoming span requests.

Security information and event management (SIEM) helps with managing and analyzing the vast amount of log information generated by networks. Of all the capabilities of SIEM, event correlation is the most powerful. This technique analyzes log data from your servers, applications, routers, firewalls, and other network devices, and identifies patterns of activity that indicate potential attacks.

Here’s the next installment of a new series of posts we’re doing on the Mattermost blog: Mattermost Recipes. The goal of these posts is to provide you with solutions to specific problems, as well as a discussion about the details of the solution and some tips about how to customize it to suit your needs perfectly.

We are happy to announce a new bugfix release for Icinga Web 2. Official packages are available on packages.icinga.com. Community repositories might need a while to catch up.

Today we are releasing a new support version of Icinga 2.8, a small one to pass the time until 2.9. This release includes fixes for the InfluxDB and Elasticsearch features. Please note that Elasticsearch 6 support is coming with 2.9. In addition to the fixes we’ve added support for multiple check parameters for the check_nscp_api plugin and working sysconfig/defaults variables support, you’ll also find many documentation updates.

If you think about it, mobile apps are among the production services most in need of real observability: nearly countless hardware platforms and operating systems in combination with your app’s code result in a dizzying matrix of possible sources for any given issue, which means you need the power of true high-cardinality search to solve your problems.

The news is filled with stories about horrible attacks against corporate and government networks. It’s almost enough to make administrators for small and mid-sized networks give up. But it’s important to note not all of these attacks are the same. There’s a vast difference, for example, between the incredibly sophisticated long-term attacks against high-profile companies and government agencies, and the mere smash-and-grab attacks.