Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

August brought notable outages across developer platforms, SaaS tools, communications services, and cloud applications. StatusGator detected 789 Early Warning Signals during the month. Of those, 153 incidents (19.39%) were acknowledged by providers, while 636 (80.61%) were not officially acknowledged. StatusGator’s Early Warning Signals often surface service disruptions before providers post an official update.

The spy from post 4 is a sharp tool. Once a test can record every interaction, it is tempting to assert on all of them. The result looks thorough, but it is usually a transcript rather than a useful specification. This post takes a test written that way, makes a change that no customer could possibly notice, and watches the test fail anyway. This is part 5 of a ten-part series. The code is in Java, Node.js, Go and Python.

Every codebase has a failure path nobody has run. Not through laziness, but because reproducing it requires a backend dependency to misbehave on cue. In the package notifier, the carrier must refuse, stall, or return nonsense at the exact moment the test runs. So the retry logic ships unverified and everyone hopes. The seam from post 2 already gives the test control. A seam is a place where you can change what code does without editing that code.

The notifier has returned a message throughout this series, which made testing almost suspiciously easy. Assert on the return value and you are done. Real notifiers do more than build strings: they send them. Once a message goes to an email provider or SMS gateway, the function may return nothing useful. When that change lands, every existing test loses the value it asserted on. This is part 4 of a ten-part series. The code is in Java, Node.js, Go and Python.

We are pleased to announce the release of MCP Servers 1.1.0, bringing new configuration options for HTTP-based deployments and expanded command-line capabilities for managing database connections. The new version makes it easier to control how MCP Servers are exposed over HTTP, host multiple MCP Servers under a single hostname, and configure connections directly from the command line.

NiCE Management Packs detect issues as they happen. Evaluation & Demo.

Open source provides the world with access to cutting-edge software, and the learning that comes with it. But how do you validate someone’s skills in an open ecosystem? Canonical Academy is a highly rigorous, job-focused qualification platform designed to empower individuals and enterprises with industry-recognized credentials. The platform addresses a critical gap in tech: validating real-world, hands-on capability rather than rote memorization.

“AI-ready” is everywhere right now, attached to nearly every product in every category. The catchy label rarely means anything specific, just as additional questions are warranted when vendors claim to be “AI-native”. After fighting through all the marketing jargon, there needs to be a standard, not a slogan. And the definition changes depending on what the data is for. AI-ready for a data warehouse and AI-ready for live operational telemetry are not the same problem.

This post analyzes the technical details of the BGP hijack against Softaculous Ltd, the company behind the Softaculous auto-installer and the Virtualizor VM management platform. The hijack enabled an attacker to fraudulently obtain a TLS certificate and use it to deliver a malicious Virtualizor update to a portion of the company’s customer base.