Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you have searched for Apache ActiveMQ end of life, you have probably encountered a wall of conflicting answers: some claiming the broker is dead, others insisting it is fine forever. Both are wrong.

Business services firms are built on people’s time, judgment, and credibility. When a consultant loses half an hour before a client workshop, a legal team is stuck waiting for a document system, or a service delivery group has to move conversations elsewhere because collaboration tools are unreliable, it may not register as a major IT event. It still changes the economics of the work, because skilled time is being spent compensating for the environment instead of serving the client.

Most IT operations teams cannot say how much of the MITRE ATT&CK framework they already cover. The framework gets explained in the language of threat hunting and red teams. The parts that belong to infrastructure work are easy to miss. And then, coverage questions get answered with a guess. The mismatch costs time on both sides. Security asks for a coverage answer that ops has no clean way to produce. Yet the controls that stop a large share of those techniques already sit with your team.

What do you say when an auditor asks for evidence that your security controls hold, and all you can produce is a scan report from last month? A scan lists weaknesses. It says nothing about whether an attacker could chain three of them together and reach the customer database. Vulnerability assessment and penetration testing answer two different questions about the same environment. The first asks what is exposed right now. The second asks what someone with intent and skill could do with that exposure.

Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is rapidly growing in popularity as modern way to deliver virtual desktops and apps to users, with Azure providing the infrastructure as alternative to on-prem VDI environments. As organizations expand their use of AVD in Azure, monitoring becomes critical.

Last week, we sat down with the authors of Observability Engineering for a live AMA. We ended up getting so many questions (pre-submitted and live) that we couldn't get through them all. Charity, Liz, George, and Austin kindly stuck around afterward to answer more, ranging from low-hanging observability fruits and telemetry to AI and what software engineers can do that Claude can't. Missed the live session? Watch it on demand now.

At.conf25, we announced our vision for Cisco Data Fabric, an architecture designed to help organizations unlock the value of machine data, fuel AI with trusted context, and support more intelligent and resilient operations. Today, that vision has become reality. Key Splunk Platform innovations including Machine Data Lake, Catalog, and Agent Launchpad, together with expanded Federated Search and Data Management capabilities, are now generally available.