Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

2020 is (finally) over, and it’s safe to say that this very challenging year taught us once again that (as the old Danish proverb says) it’s difficult making predictions, especially about the future. Who would have imagined in January 2020 that we would find ourselves where we are today… And yet, as Tim Harford once wrote in the Financial Times, predictions are like Pringles: nobody thinks that there’s any great virtue in them but we find them hard to resist.

I hope I’m not alone in starting 2021 with some sense of optimism. While several hard months remain ahead of us, I am hopeful and also expecting that some sense of normality will return by the summer months. Either way, this gives us an opportunity to reflect on the challenges we have faced. 2020 was testing. We learnt a lot about ourselves and our businesses in the most challenging of circumstances.

2020 was, needless to say, not the best. Looking on the brighter side, in December, FireHydrant turned 2, and in spite of it all, we grew quite a bit. We raised our $8M Series A in May, our team grew nearly 4x in size, added some amazing features such as making FireHydrant Runbooks even more powerful with conditions, and great integrations, which you can find here. But even better, we got to work with all of you!

Open source has come a long way. One of my favorite reports on the subject is Red Hat’s State of Enterprise Open Source. For 2020, 95% of respondents said that open source is strategically important to their business needs. Here, I will be recapping my recent Illuminate presentation about embracing open source data collection and I thought it’s important to first talk about how open source has changed.

Moving full speed ahead into 2021, a year that is slated to be marked by unpredictability, fast-paced change, and (still) a lot of disruption – no organization can afford to allow such disorder to impact productivity, operations, and the business overall.

In this blog, we break down the timeline of the number one hacker threat to ecommerce sites today – Magecart. The 2020 Magecart timeline includes all the significant Magecart attacks in 2020. With 4,800 formjacking attacks each month alone, this timeline only represents a small proportion of attacks reported in the public domain in 2020.

Syslog is a popular standard for centralizing and formatting log data generated by network devices. It provides a standardized way of generating and collecting log information, such as program errors, notices, warnings, status messages, and so on. Almost all Unix-like operating systems, such as those based on Linux or BSD kernels, use a Syslog daemon that is responsible for collecting log information and storing it.

In this article, we are going to see how we can integrate Google Cloud with Grafana. We will integrate Google Cloud SQL with Grafana and plot the metrics on Grafana. We will also look at how we can use Google Stackdriver as the data source in Grafana to expose the metrics of Google Cloud VM’s and platforms. To use Grafana immediately, we will be using Hosted Grafana by MetricFire.

Both Graphite and InfluxDB are time-series monitoring data platforms, both of which have high levels of adoption throughout many industries. Both of them are suitable for enterprise use, are scalable, and are stable. That being said, there are some benefits and drawbacks to each. While InfluxDB has many benefits, many developers still prefer Graphite due to its large community, stability, and reliability.

We recently took a look at some of the repercussions of the global pandemic and how it has caused a dramatic shift in the way we work. In the second instalment of our predictions for 2021, we explore some of the longer term trends that will be top of mind for enterprises this year…