AI-related announcements dominate once more. New models for Bedrock. Vector search everywhere, and DynamoDB does a bait-and-switch. Welcome to day 3 of re:Invent 2023.

Have you ever sat down and thought to yourself, “What’s new at Kentik?” Well, you’re in luck! Welcome to the first edition of a blog series to highlight the best and brightest of Kentik that month.

“What’s New in Sysdig” is back with the November 2023 edition! My name is Dimitris Vassilopoulos, based in London, United Kingdom, and I’m excited to share our latest feature releases with you!

In the dynamic landscape of microservices and cloud-native architectures, the role of service meshes has become increasingly crucial. These programmable frameworks empower users to seamlessly connect, secure, and observe their microservices, relieving them of the complexities associated with these critical tasks within their applications. Istio, a leading service mesh project, has been at the forefront of this evolution since its inception in 2017.

This is the second of a three-part blog series. Prior to reading this, be sure to check out Part 1, Benefiting from multi-cluster setups requires familiarity with common variations. In your Kubernetes journey, it's highly likely that you'll encounter the need to manage multiple clusters simultaneously.

This article was originally published in APM Digest here. Multicasting in this context refers to the process of directing data streams to two or more destinations. This might look like sending the same telemetry data to both an on-premises storage system and a cloud-based observability platform concurrently. The two principal benefits of this strategy are cost savings and service redundancy.

For too long, engineers have had to piece together an unwieldy combination of tools to collaboratively debug and resolve incidents while pair programming in real time. These activities normally require developers to work individually through a terminal, but the patchwork solutions that allow teams to work together in terminals all have significant drawbacks.

Before we dive into the best StatusHub alternatives, let’s quickly recap the tool’s capabilities. In short, StatusHub is an IT incident communication tool. As indicated by its name, StatusHub is focused on creating and managing status pages. Users get to leverage their connected hub of status pages to communicate system statuses, incidents, and maintenance updates to different audiences, customers, and stakeholders.

The advent of Machine Learning (ML) has unlocked new possibilities in various domains, including full lifecycle Application Performance Monitoring (APM). Maintaining peak performance and seamless user experiences poses significant challenges with the diversity of modern applications. So where and how does ML and APM fit together? Traditional monitoring methods are often reactive, resolving concerns after the process already affected the application’s performance.

In an era defined by rapid technological advancements, the cloud has emerged as a transformative force, revolutionizing the way businesses store, manage, and process their data. According to industry reports, 90% of large organizations have already implemented multi-cloud environments. In 2020, the global cloud market was valued at approximately $371.4 billion, and it’s not showing any sign of slowing down.

Grafana vs. Power BI – This is often a confusing decision for people wanting to select a data visualization and analytics tool with visually appealing and interactive insights. In this article, we highlight the features and benefits of both tools —Grafana and Power BI, bringing out their key differences to help you make a better decision. If you're interested in trying it out for yourself, sign up for our free trial.

The Cloud infrastructure solution has been around for many years now and has been proven that it can optimize your operations, reduce costs, and boost the efficiencies of developers. Thanks to these benefits, organizations of all sizes in different industries are considering moving into the Cloud infrastructure if they haven’t. This article will explore the world of cloud infrastructure, helping you determine if it is the right fit for your organization.

Recently, we launched a new Sandbox focused on handling syslog at scale with Cribl. The marketing messaging behind the Sandbox has been done a couple times already; therefore I wanted to let y’all see what we as Cribl Technical Marketing Engineers(TMEs) actually do in our daily lives. I’ll try to keep it engaging, with tales of danger and subterfuge, but I can only take so much artistic license. What’s in a Sandbox and how the Sandbox platform functions (i.e.

Elastic’s innovative investments to support an open ecosystem and a simpler developer experience In this blog, we want to share the investments that Elastic® is making to simplify your experience as you build AI applications. We know that developers have to stay nimble in today’s fast-evolving AI environment. Yet, common challenges make building generative AI applications needlessly rigid and complicated. To name just a few.

System Center Operations Manager 2022 brings forth an essential update in the form of UR2, a significant milestone in enhancing functionality and rectifying issues. UR2 introduces pivotal features such as Azure Migrate integration and delivers a myriad of fixes to improve performance and stability.

Microsoft Teams has emerged as a vital communication and collaboration platform for modern workplaces. As organizations increasingly rely on Teams to conduct meetings, share files, and collaborate on projects, ensuring a seamless user experience becomes paramount. To achieve this, the implementation of effective Quality of Service (QoS) measures is crucial.

DevAlert 2.0, which is now immediately available from Percepio, is a major upgrade to our edge observability platform. The upgrade provides much improved diagnostic capabilities, including core dumps for Arm Cortex-M devices. This allows remote inspection of crashes, errors or security anomalies in full detail, including the function call stack, parameters and variables and with source code display.

Grafana Agent v0.38 has hit the digital shelves just before the holiday season! 🧑‍🎄 The elves over at Grafana Labs have been quietly working on Grafana Agent, with more than 50 updates for all SREs and developers to use — no matter if you’re on the naughty or nice list. This includes new features, improvements, bug fixes, and significant ease-of-use changes.

AVD (Azure Virtual Desktop) has grown in popularity and for many reasons many organizations are choosing to consume AVD via a specialist Managed Service Provider (MSP). For the MSPs offering AVD, monitoring and troubleshooting AVD especially for multi-tenant environments is challenging and involves significant, costly and skilled effort using native tools such as Azure Insights or Azure Monitor.

Various economic pressures on businesses have created a focus on new and innovative ways to manage operational costs. At the same time, businesses are looking at using IT to help manage overall business costs and increase income—for example, by supporting remote working, and in many cases, enabling e-commerce to replace closed retail outlets.

In the dynamic landscape of IT services, staying ahead of the curve is not just a strategy but a necessity. For IT service providers already consulting clients on monitoring solutions, taking the next step to engage in an official partnership with Icinga can be a transformative move. Let’s explore the reasons why such a partnership can elevate your service offering and provide substantial benefits for both your business and your clients.

Application security testing tools are designed to ensure that applications are put through rigorous security assessments to identify security flaws within the application and its code. Even though applications are tested thoroughly (in static and dynamic ways), attackers always seem to find new ways of compromising them.

Network monitoring is a critical component in network management, ensuring that all systems and services are running smoothly. Monitoring a network involves continuously surveilling network components to detect any potential issues or performance bottlenecks that may arise. Doing so guarantees that the network’s performance remains at its peak, providing users with a seamless experience.

A smooth business operation hinges on maintaining a robust and efficient network. Proactively identifying and addressing issues before they impact users is critical. Network monitoring plays a pivotal role, and a network monitoring dashboard is a key tool in the arsenal.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) now offers a high-performance storage class, S3 Express One Zone, that delivers consistent single-digit millisecond data access for your most latency-sensitive applications. Designed for your most frequently accessed datasets, S3 Express One Zone replicates and stores your data within a single AWS Availability Zone, scales to process millions of requests per minute, and uses hardware and software optimized for low latency.

In the realm of online management, staying vigilant about the expiration date of domain names is paramount. Uptimia's Domain Monitoring Tool emerges as a solution to streamline this process, providing timely alerts to prevent the oversight of crucial domain renewal deadlines.

AppSignal now supports Solid Cache, giving you the same deep cache performance insights you'd get from other Rails cache stores. In this blog post, we'll give you a quick tour of Solid Cache, and how you can benefit from monitoring your app's cache with AppSignal.

CPU-bound tasks can grind your Node.js applications to a standstill, frustrating users and driving them away. You must master the art of profiling your application to pinpoint bottlenecks, and implement effective strategies to resolve any issues. In this guide, we'll explore various techniques to help you identify and fix the root causes of your Node.js performance issues. Let's get started!

We are pleased to share a sneak peek of Query Assistant, our latest innovation that bridges the world of declarative querying with Generative AI. Leveraging our large language models (LLMs), Coralogix’s Query Assistant translates your natural language request for insights into data queries. This delivers deep visibility into all your data for everyone in your organization.

Observability is important to understand what’s happening in production. But carving out the time to add instrumentation to a codebase is daunting, and often treated as a separate task to writing features. This means that we end up instrumenting for observability long after a feature has shipped, usually when there’s a problem with it and we’ve lost all context. What if we instead treated observability similarly to how we treat tests?

We had the opening keynote by Adam Selipsky. If you missed the live stream, you can watch it on YouTube here. Unsurprisingly, so much of the keynote was about AI.

We're thrilled to share an exciting update from Logit.io. As part of our ongoing commitment to providing cutting-edge observability solutions to our users, we've integrated OpenSearch 2.10.0 into our platform, bringing a host of advanced features to enhance your experience. Let's dive into what's new and how these changes can benefit your observability workflows.

Welcome to the third chapter of the handbook on Anomaly Detection for Time Series Data! This series of blog posts aims to provide an in-depth look into the fundamentals of anomaly detection and root cause analysis. It will also address the challenges posed by the time-series characteristics of the data and demystify technical jargon by breaking it down into easily understandable language.

When the concept of Zero Trust emerged in 2010, it marked a sea change in how IT and network security are handled. The term, invented by Forrester Research analyst John Kindervag, is loosely based on the “never trust, always verify” motto. So why is this a sea change? Before 2010, IT focused on perimeter defenses and the concept of DMZs — areas of the network they deemed safe based on the protection they implemented.

Is there a gap between the potential of network automation and widespread industry implementation? Phil Gervasi explores how the adoption challenges of network automation are multifaceted and aren’t all technical in nature.

Today Sysdig has been recognized for achieving the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Ready designation from Amazon Web Services (AWS). This specialization recognizes that the Sysdig cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) is validated by AWS Partner Solutions Architects to integrate with Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Anywhere. Amazon EKS Ready Partners like Sysdig offer AWS customers the ability to customize the Kubernetes solution to fit their business needs.

Today, businesses are heavily reliant on online systems and platforms. But how would you communicate with users if you encounter downtime or an incident? This is where a status page comes in. A status page acts as a real-time communication hub, providing updates on system status, incidents, and maintenance activities. What’s even better is that you can find tons of free, self-hosted, and open-source status page systems to choose from online.

After the absolute barrage of announcements on day 0, day 1 brought us some mild excitement and one big disappointment…

Learning about the past helps us understand the present, and even predict the future. So, whether you are monitoring CPU usage or how long your IoT device was powered on and then off, at some point, you might want to know the difference of a value over time. InfluxDB is an open source database for storing and retrieving time series data. Thanks to its own query languages — flux and InfluxQL — it provides different and powerful ways to analyze data.

In this edition of the Cloud Observer, we dig into the impacts of recent submarine cable maintenance on intercontinental cloud connectivity and call for the greater transparency from the submarine cable industry about incidents which cause critical cables to be taken out of service.

As an administrator of an expanding, highly distributed infrastructure, you may be responsible for overseeing thousands of on-premise and cloud resources from multiple providers—governed under dozens of accounts by a complex nest of RBAC rules. To query all these resources for purposes such as compliance audits and access management, you may be required to write custom scripts and painstakingly sift through data across disparate tools.

Logz.io is excited to announce Service Map, a new way to visualize the data flow, dependencies, and critical performance metrics throughout your microservices architecture, which makes it easy to gather critical troubleshooting context as you investigate production issues.

We're excited to announce a new integration with screen capture tool Bird Eats Bug!

Ever since we launched Query Assistant last June, we’ve learned a lot about working with—and improving—Large Language Models (LLMs) in production with Honeycomb. Today, we’re sharing those techniques so that you can use them to achieve better outputs from your own LLM applications. The techniques in this blog are a new Honeycomb use case. You can use them today. For free. With Honeycomb.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced the 2023 AWS Partner Award winners, recognizing leaders around the globe playing a key role helping customers drive innovation and build solutions on AWS. Announced during re:Invent 2023, AWS Partner Awards recognize our Top Partners of the Year and Rising Star Partners of the Year, whose business models have embraced specialization, innovation, and collaboration over the past year.

Cribl’s internal metrics are very handy for seeing what Cribl is doing. And while there are many data points related to input vs output volumes, sometimes you need more control over what you’re tracking. This pack allows you to route arbitrarily defined traffic through a stats tracker to capture changes in event count and volume. Perhaps you are onboarding a new host, or trialing a new Pipeline.

The single pane of glass is perhaps the most enduring and elusive goal of enterprise IT operations teams. When we polled our customers a couple of years ago, out of 184 respondents, 99% of them rated it as important to their business – with 64% indicating “extremely important”. The shared dream is to have: But unfortunately, the single pane of glass has become a bit of myth.

On-premise or SaaS network monitoring tool: which one to choose? This question has been bugging many businesses for quite a few years now. And no matter how much I hate to say it but the answer to this burning question is — it depends. Yes, it depends on several factors. In this blog, we will list all those factors that you should keep in mind before making this decision.

In typical re:Invent fashion, AWS has made a series of big announcements before the main event even kicks off! Here are some groundbreaking serverless updates that you should know about.

Every day, we generate tons of data, so much so that we cannot analyze them manually anymore. Visualization is a process by which the generated data will be broken down into smaller packages. Visualization extensively relies on observability and the triumvirate of Logs, Metrics and Traces. When it comes to visualizations and dashboards, Kibana and Grafana are two prominent names in the market. What makes them stand apart from their peers is their ability to conceive top-notch analytics charts.

CI/CD services such as AWS CodePipeline enable developers to automate and accelerate the process of building, testing, and deploying code. But with the speed, scale, and complexity of the modern software development life cycle, even small performance regressions or increases in failure rates in your CI system can quickly snowball, slowing or even halting releases and causing cost overruns.

Containers are powerful tools for scaling and deploying your applications, but with so many components pulled from different sources, there’s a greater potential for issues within them to go undetected. As a result, you need to monitor every layer of your containerized environments for vulnerabilities and performance problems—from your application to your container images.

When you’re responding to an issue with your application in the heat of on-call, you need reliable, well-maintained tooling that’s painless to use. Otherwise, the time you’ll spend combing through monitoring data for context, connecting to hosts and other infrastructure resources, and pivoting between consoles for various managed services can add up quickly and slow your response.

Enabling auto-instrumentation for your Lambda functions provides detailed insights into the performance and security of your serverless applications. Developers often also use custom instrumentation to fine-tune visibility and further tailor telemetry to their business needs. However, different teams within your organization might use a variety of instrumentation libraries, and achieving more granular visibility can come at the expense of data portability and interoperability.

Our previous post was all about dipping your toes into the wonderful world of API interaction. By leveraging Cribl’s API you can automate many parts of your event pipeline management and tasks. So we got that goin’ for us. Which is nice. One of the common use cases for the API I hear about is kicking off data collection automatically. Use cases include: Cribl gives you the tools to collect data when you want, from where you want, and to where you want.

Let’s be honest, working with Kubernetes (K8s) has never been the easiest tech to work with. As a seasoned Kubernetes professional, I find myself constantly looking for ways to set up collecting data from my clusters, only to find out that there is a new, more complicated way to get the data I’m looking for.

To monitor and troubleshoot the performance of microservice-based applications, Jaeger and Zipkin are examples of the most commonly used open-source distributed tracing systems. They both supply users with insight into the flow of requests through various components of a system, which can be utilized to find latency bottlenecks, errors, and performance problems in the system.

At one time, tech advancements were a major drain on small businesses. Housing your software and digital assets in-house once created a financial nightmare many emerging companies couldn't handle. On top of that, threats to security and a complete lack of flexibility made establishing a foothold challenging. That was especially true when going up against established industry heavy hitters.

In the ever-evolving world of IT, keeping an eye on application, service and system performance and addressing issues in real-time is crucial both to an organization’s customer experience, as well as its overall success. Two terms and approaches that have gained significant attention in recent years are AIOps and observability. While they both relate to improving IT monitoring and management, they serve distinct roles in enhancing operational efficiency.

When the concept of Zero Trust emerged in 2010, it marked a sea change in how IT and network security are handled. The term, invented by Forrester Research analyst John Kindervag, is loosely based on the “never trust, always verify” motto. So why is this a sea change? Before 2010, IT focused on perimeter defenses and the concept of DMZs — areas of the network they deemed safe based on the protection they implemented.

Grafana is a tool that helps users identify and fix performance issues by allowing them to monitor and analyze their database. Grafana is famous for making great graphs and visualizations, with tons of different functionalities. This Grafana tutorial is about one of these functionalities: Annotations. Grafana annotations are for users who want to make notes directly onto the graphs in their dashboards. There are various reasons a user might want to do this.

It’s that time of the year again as re:Invent is almost upon us Here is a list of the serverless-related announcements so far that you should know about.

Internet Information Services (IIS) stands out as the primary web hosting solution for Windows-based servers. With a heritage deeply rooted in Microsoft's commitment to providing robust and reliable web server software, IIS has evolved into the top choice for hosting websites and web applications. The inherent compatibility between IIS and the Windows operating system sets it apart from other web server options, enabling it to fully leverage the strengths of the Windows environment.

Observability has brought a new approach to IT infrastructure management, easing the workload on IT admins across the world and bringing more accuracy and efficiency. One of the clear beneficiaries of this evolution in IT infrastructure management is incident response. Incident response is the systematic process of identifying, analyzing, and mitigating security threats, breaches, or operational issues to minimize their impact on the continuity of business operations.

In today's interconnected world, the reliability of network infrastructure, especially Cisco Catalyst switches, plays a key role for businesses. To ensure these critical components perform optimally, it's vital to monitor their metrics effectively. This article will show you how to effortlessly monitor Cisco Catalyst metrics with Grafana, a top-tier monitoring and visualization platform.

At SquaredUp, we have been debating how the senior leadership team can monitor the ‘health’ of our engineering teams. To do this, we decided to create a dashboard that could represent this for a team – but first, we needed to figure out what to measure. Our goal was to better understand our teams to inform which actions to take to support them and make them a happier and more productive bunch.

This blog post is also available as a recorded talk with slides.

The cloud changed how businesses work, making things more flexible and adaptable. But keeping track of app performance from a user’s point of view in this new setup is tough. Legacy tools tend to not give developers an understanding of their users' perspective. That's where synthetic monitoring comes in. It's a strong way to focus on users and fix the problems that legacy tools miss.

Top tips is a weekly column where we highlight what’s trending in the tech world today and list out ways to explore these trends. This week, we’re examining four use cases for AI in the ever-growing FinTech sector. The FinTech sector has transformed the discussion around the financial services industry from top to bottom.

My last thoughts on this blog were published some two and a half years ago, and the topic of RISE with SAP and where it best fits has evolved over time. By now, SAP RISE is familiar to the SAP marketplace and has become more understood and recognized – though how SAP markets the solution leaves some subtle and important details unclear.

Last week, we were very excited to host our first ever SquaredUp Virtual Customer Workshop! We’d received so much positive feedback on the intimate in-person workshop we ran in the UK last month that we wanted to extend the invitation worldwide – by recreating the experience virtually. Using the digital conferencing app Gather Town, we were pleased to welcome 23 SquaredUp customers from 12 countries to our virtual “SquaredUp Town”.

In this post I’m comparing cron monitoring features of four services: Cronitor, Healthchecks.io, Uptime Robot, Sentry. How I picked the services for comparison: I searched for “cron monitoring” on Google and picked the top results in their order of appearance. Disclaimer: I run Healthchecks.io, so I’m a biased source. I’ve tried to get the facts right, but choosing what features to compare, and what differences to highlight, is of course subjective.

Proactive network monitoring is no less than a superpower. Just like how the Spidey sense alerted Spiderman of any dangers, proactive network monitoring also helps you to: This is why every business big or small is investing in proactive monitoring to optimize their systems and resolve security issues in real-time. In this blog, we will share some of the key benefits of proactive network monitoring along with the top challenges and best practices that can help your business in the long run.

In the world of IT support, where time is always ticking and employee satisfaction is on the line, removing inefficiencies in ticket resolution can be nothing short of a game-changer. One major source of inefficiency in nearly every service desk operation relates to the process of obtaining and confirming information about users and devices. Comprehensive and unified information about a device and/or a user typically isn’t immediately available, and gathering it is a major burden.

Grafana is an open-source web application for visualizing data. You can query your data, create visuals, and receive alerts to better understand what you have. Some people think of Grafana as a Kubernetes-only tool, but in reality, it’s simply a data visualization tool that became popular within the Kubernetes ecosystem, especially when combined with Prometheus. In this post, I’ll focus on a very specific part of Grafana: the dashboards.

ManageEngine OpManager MSP now features the integration of the IP address management (IPAM) and switch port mapper (SPM) add-on. But what does this mean for MSPs, and how can it solve the challenges MSPs face daily?

Top 6 reasons for website downtime What is website downtime? Website downtime is a period during which a website is unavailable to its users, making them unable to carry out desired functions such as making purchases, accessing information, or ordering food. In a fast-paced digital landscape where users expect instant access, any delay or unavailability can have significant consequences for a website's business and reputation.

Upcoming specific new AWS regulations will significantly impact how businesses handle their AWS operations. Starting from January 15, 2024, AWS will no longer permit the resale of discounted Reserved Instances (RIs) bought from the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance Marketplace. This update aligns with AWS’s service terms, particularly Section 5.5, which explicitly prohibits the resale of discounted RIs.

AWS Step Functions allows you to coordinate activity from hundreds of services—including AWS Lambda, Amazon EKS, and Amazon API Gateway—to build and orchestrate serverless workflows. With Step Functions, you organize work into workflows known as state machines, in which each state defines a task or decision and specifies the next state in the workflow.

Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers foundation models (FMs) built by leading AI companies, such as AI21 labs, Meta, and Amazon along with other tools for building generative AI applications. After enabling access to validation and training data stored in Amazon S3, customers can fine-tune their FMs to invoke tasks such as text generation, content creation, and chatbot Q&A—without provisioning or managing any infrastructure.

Here at Logz.io, we realize Kubernetes is the most common infrastructure component that organizations are running on to keep their applications going. In return, we’ve made a big investment to support Kubernetes properly and give customers the tools they need to investigate and troubleshoot any issues that arise.

Developers and SREs choose to host their applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for its reliability, speed, and ease of use. On Google Cloud, development teams are finding additional value in migrating to Kubernetes on GKE, leveraging the latest serverless options like Cloud Run, and improving traditional, tiered applications with managed services. Elastic Observability offers 16 out-of-the-box integrations for Google Cloud services with more on the way.

Since we introduced role-based access control (RBAC) in Grafana 9.0, users — and later, service accounts — have been required to have an assigned role that includes a basic set of permissions. This sometimes led organizations to create users and service accounts that had more permissions than necessary. As a result, Grafana administrators had to make additional adjustments to users’ permissions on a case-by-case basis.

In our community forum Michael already outlined the possibility to operate Icinga 2 with an external certification authority, not the one Icinga 2 generates by itself. Thomas, one of our NETWAYS colleagues, reported his experience in that field: in short, it’s easy to mess up lots of things and hard to debug them. And I absolutely agree. At the moment I’m reading TLS Mastery from Michael W. Lucas.

While it makes for bleak reading, the frenzy of sales and online shopping activity surrounding Black Friday, means this pre-holiday season is a key period for cybercriminals. And each year we see an increase in cyberattacks during what should be a feel-good time. With more consumers expected to be shopping online this year, the opportunity for fraudulent behaviour is rife. But that doesn’t mean we have to surrender to the risks of poor website security.

Let’s set the table a bit. As you know, in the U.S., Thanksgiving is coming up. And recently I had a conversation with my 83-year-old mother about Thanksgiving. Of course, we came across the inevitable parallels between Thanksgiving dinner and network security! That’s what you would be thinking when talking about Thanksgiving dinner with someone right? Before we dive into the feast, let me set the table.

A lot of reasoning in content is predicated on the audience being in a modern, psychologically safe, agile sort of environment. It’s aspirational, so folks who aren’t in those environments may feel like the path there includes doing “the new thing” or using “the new tool.” If you write software and your employer hasn’t caught up to all the newest, best ways to work, I hope this pragmatic post helps you sleep better at night.