Managing services is hard for both service owners and stakeholders. To make things easier for everyone, define a clear set of expectations from the beginning. This helps measure and evaluate the health of services easier.

On the morning of September 4th, 2018 a number of customers experienced sign-in problems related to an outage for Azure, Azure AD and, in turn, Office 365. The issue was caused by an outage in Microsoft’s South Central U.S. datacenter. The problem ended up affecting customers in other regions, too, as we will see.

To protect intellectual property and trade secrets while ensuring compliance, today’s leading organizations are becoming increasingly privacy-conscious. To this end, many companies are moving away from cloud-based SaaS messaging services like Slack and Microsoft Teams to private cloud alternatives like Mattermost. That way, they’re able to maintain complete control over all of their messaging data—instead of letting vendors store that important information on their own servers.

In an earlier blog in our series on monitoring applications deployed to the Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) platform, my colleague Jeff Holmes described how AppDynamics provides an intuitive and user-friendly dashboard for a single view of all your key performance indicators for system health and availability. This broke new ground and has been warmly welcomed by our many customers who rely on PCF to run their business applications.

SAN FRANCISCO – Sept. 11, 2018 – Today at PagerDuty Summit 2018, PagerDuty, a global leader in digital operations management, launched two new products to extend its digital operations management platform: PagerDuty Visibility and PagerDuty Analytics. PagerDuty Visibility provides IT leaders, technical responders, and business owners a shared, real-time view into operational health that impacts both consumers and business.

An MSP’s ability to do effective work depends on their technical expertise. However, their ability to ensure customer satisfaction is what really grows their business. This is because high levels of customer satisfaction retain current clients and win over future ones. Given this reality, MSPs need to be strategic about how they approach their work as every interaction is an opportunity to improve customer satisfaction.

To effectively support and manage a client’s network, you need to know what’s really on the network. Sure, a tour of the IT environment will help. You’ll be able to slowly document information about the devices you can see, like the make, model, and serial number. But what about the devices you can’t see—or that the client doesn’t know about?

Background: Boston Software was long overdue for an affordable, reliable APM solution that could provide deep and credible insight into the behavior of its services. Customers began reporting an issue with the software, but traditional monitoring was unable to pinpoint the source.

Now that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), drawn up by the European Union (EU), has finally come into effect, many of the affected organizations have been scrambling to keep up with the auditing and operational requirements of a compliance regime that’s widely recognized as one of the most stringent and comprehensive regulatory frameworks ever devised for protecting data privacy.

NGINX can be used as a proxy to provide authenticated access to specific endpoints for any RESTful service API — including the Sensu API. Below I provide an NGINX configuration to grant external service provides narrow access to only create check results in the Sensu 1.4 API external service providers. But first, here's some backstory of how I got here.