Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

First off, what is synthetic monitoring? What if synthetic monitoring meant monitoring whether or not something is real or fake…watch out Kardashians! Jokes aside, no, synthetic monitoring doesn’t monitor celebrity plastic surgery decisions. Synthetic monitoring is a kind of website performance monitoring that simulates user interactions with a site. A great synthetic monitoring tool instantly alerts you when an issue is encountered.

Unpatched security vulnerabilities are utilized in the majority of data breaches and ransomware attacks. In fact, research shows that many CVEs go unfixed for long periods to time leaving companies open to unnecessary exposure. 60% of breaches involved vulnerabilities of which a patch was available but not yet applied. This is why vulnerability management is so important and not only having a plan but selecting the right tools to support your plan.

Building Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams is hard! There are so many articles and explanations of what SRE means, it’s easy to get lost. Going beyond understanding what the individual SRE role is into building and scaling a team of SREs is more of a challenge. It’s important to find the right information that will help you take your SRE team to the next level.

Although it is not well known to the general public, virtualization technology is widely used in technical environments for being useful when carrying out multiple tasks and for the possibilities it offers for better resource usage. Virtualization technology software is increasingly used by professionals in the sector, having already become an essential tool for the work of many of them.

How does one manage monitoring in the age of digital infrastructure as code? Also as code, of course! Combining HashiCorp Terraform Cloud and Checkly enables you to configure synthetic and API monitoring as part of your existing infrastructure codebase. It is flexible, programmable and will keep you out of maintenance hell, even at scale: it is monitoring for developers. Extending your existing Terraform Cloud configuration takes only two minutes. Let's take a look together.

Indexing the web is hard. There’s a nearly infinite supply of misbehaving sites, misapplied (or ignored) standards, duplicate content, and corner cases to contend with. It’s a big task to create an easy-to-use web crawler that’s thorough and flexible enough to account for all the different content it encounters.

Today’s organizations face ransomware, malware, and other cyber attacks, and managed service providers (MSPs) need an incident response plan (or “IRP”) to mitigate against these threats. In a recent survey of 200 MSPs, 74% of respondents said they have suffered a cyber attack, and 83% noted their small and medium-sized business (SMB) customers experienced one as well. Yet, with an incident response plan (IRP), MSPs can protect themselves and their customers against cyber attacks.

In 2020, the concept of observability in IT operations gained mindshare as IT leaders looked for new ways to rein in the complexity that’s grown organically with cloud computing and rapid digitization. Observability differs from IT monitoring in that it focuses on the development of the application and rich instrumentation so that operators can ask meaningful questions about how the software works or is working in production.

In early October 2020, the Department of Defense released its long-anticipated and much needed Data Strategy. This strategy is the latest installment under the Department’s Digital Modernization Strategy, which was released in July 2019, and focused on the key strategic pillars of enterprise cloud adoption, artificial intelligence, command, control, communications, cybersecurity, and IT reform.

Incident management tools allow technology and security teams to resolve major incidents faster including urgent issues that may lead to businesses seeing application and site downtime affecting their users.