Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Leaders can be categorized, somewhat, by their motivation. I recall an offsite meeting a few years ago that began with everyone contemplating the question, "Why do you lead?" There were about 15 people in the room, and each attendee could be grouped in one of the following categories: Nothing is wrong with any of these categories necessarily. They’re all concepts that can drive either positive or negative outcomes.

As IT environments become more complex, enterprises running business-critical workloads in dynamic environments need to ensure the performance and reliability of their applications. This is where observability comes in. Observability is the ability of the internal states of a system to be inferred from external outputs. Without it, your team’s productivity could be greatly diminished.

What a difference a year makes. In a matter of 365 days, the entire planet stared down at uncertainty, and while most of the world is far from recovered, we are starting to see a time where some level of normalcy will return. But what will this look like? How will the past year transform our social interactions, our time out of the house, and how we conduct business?

Not a long time ago, we released Icinga for Windows v1.3.1, fixing plenty of reported issues from our amazing community and user bases. Today however, we want to talk about the next big release for Icinga for Windows and are excited to tell you more about all the new features!

Today, we announced that Refinery is now generally available. With Refinery, it’s now easy to highlight the critical debugging data you need and to stop paying for the rest. Refinery is a sampling solution that lets you control resource costs at scale without sacrificing data fidelity. Support for Refinery is now also included in Honeycomb Enterprise plans.

One of the serverless best practices is one-purpose functions. You should keep your Lambda functions small and solve exactly one use-case. This way, you can optimize them better and keep potential security problems contained. But creating many small functions can get overwhelming quickly. Even small projects can end up with more than 20 Lambda functions.

Like many other industries, contact centers are increasingly relying on employees working from home. The WFH trend poses new challenges, but it also surfaces issues that were largely ignored before. This article explains how holistic monitoring with Splunk Contact Center Analytics and uberAgent help drive exceptional customer service.

With our ability to ingest GCP logs and metrics into Splunk and Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring, there’s never been a better time to start driving value out of your GCP data. We’ve already started to explore this with the great blog from Matt here: Getting to Know Google Cloud Audit Logs. Expanding on this, there’s now a pre-built set of dashboards available in a Splunkbase App: GCP Application Template for Splunk!

Because the world continues to work from home this year, I’ve had to configure Cisco AnyConnect VPNs on ASA firewalls for clients a few times. Unfortunately, the documentation from Cisco is extremely confusing, and I’ve seen a lot of organizations that do it wrong (by which I mean insecurely). The process itself is quite simple, though, so let’s go through the steps you’ll need to configure Cisco AnyConnect for your VPN.

Java Management Extensions, or JMX, was first added to J2EE, and it has been part of J2SE since the 5.0 release. The JMX API aims to provide a standard for monitoring and managing Java-enabled applications and services. In this article, we will explain the JMX architecture and show you how to pull the metrics that it generates into your Sumo Logic account in order to gain unique insights and a more thorough understanding of the health of your application and services.