It could be argued that consumer broadband networks have historically been poor neighbours of business networks, with CSPs investing more funds in providing better SLAs to their higher paying business customers. But like it did for many of our pre-set ideas, the pandemic turned the tables around for broadband priority. Forced work from home policies, remote learning, and quarantines have effectively turned consumer broadband into business/educational/health broadband services for many.

From exposing your network vulnerabilities to becoming a passageway for intruders, open ports can pose several risk vectors that threaten your network’s confidentiality, integrity, and availability. This is why it’s a best practice to close your open ports. To tackle the risks introduced by open ports, network admins rely on port scanning tools to identify, inspect, analyze, and close open ports in their networks.

Our product & dev team has been cranking out so many small, medium and big updates the last ~2 months, we thought we'd do a comprehensive sum up. Grab some coffee ☕️ and strap yourself in: the list is quite long!

As part of my job as a Senior Solutions Engineer here at Grafana Labs, I tend to pretty easily find ways out of technical troubles. However, I was recently having some Wi-Fi issues at home and needed to do some troubleshooting. My experience changed my whole opinion on logs, and I wanted to share my story in hopes that I could open up some other people’s eyes as well. (I originally posted a version of this story on my personal blog in January.) First, some background info.

IT teams across the digital world are currently facing their biggest test yet. Ensuring that things are running smoothly when employees are working from home. And they’re doing a very good job at it. But, there’s always room for improvement right? If you’ve ever been a part of an IT team, you know the pain of jumping between multiple software tools, the effects of a broken down collaboration system and the struggle for visibility amongst team members.

After we’d fixed Aparna’s network issue, James came to see me at my desk. Masks on, socially distanced and all that, but it was nice to have some face-to-face time. James is cool – that dry British humor and not your classic IT Ops dude. He’s been here forever and mentored me when the CIO, Charlie, hired me as the first SRE here a year or so ago. I lucked out really.

Running and troubleshooting production services requires deep visibility into your applications and infrastructure. Virtual machines running on Google Compute Engine (GCE) provide some system logs and metrics without any configuration required, but capturing application and advanced system data has required the installation of both a metrics agent and a logging agent.

It can be really exciting when your development team is growing fast! But then you soon realize that managing all the developer tools to constantly create new projects or add users is becoming a full-time job. Well, not anymore. At least, not for Rollbar. We’re releasing our HashiCorp Terraform Verified Provider for Rollbar today, built in partnership with HashiCorp.

The term cloud native is widely used when thinking about computing and software development, encompassing a wide range of concepts that are regularly used in technology. Let’s break it down and take a closer look – what does cloud native really mean?

The current landscape of what our customers are dealing with in monitoring and observability can be a bit of a mess. For one thing, there are varying expectations and implementations when it comes to observability data. For another, most customers have to lean on a hodgepodge of tools that might blend open source and proprietary, require extensive onboarding as team members have to learn which tools are used for what, and have a steep learning curve in general.