Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

On Monday September 28 a multi-hour global Microsoft 365 outage brought down Teams, Office 365 and Outlook leaving many people disconnected. While Microsoft outages are rare, there are a range of possible issues on your network and in your user’s environment that can cause service issues at any time. Knowing quickly when these are happening, and what’s causing them is key to keeping users productive on Microsoft 365.

Legacy generations of networks have predominately provided services with best-effort delivery. While this has worked for voice, text and best- effort broadband services, end users are hampered with buffering, delays, and drops as the demand for feature-rich services continues to grow.

According to a report by Google, mobile users abandon webpages if the load time is more than three seconds. In other words, even a fractionally slower website will lead to a bad user experience and increased bounce rates. Today’s users are more demanding and expect near-instantaneous load times and seamless experiences. If you can’t meet their expectations, they’ll find other websites or applications capable of providing a better experience.

For today’s tech tip, we’re going to focus on our Endpoint Monitoring Client and two specific use cases: Wi-Fi and application health. With so much of the workforce working remotely, Endpoint Monitoring is an essential tool to help smooth the transition. According to recent research from Gartner, nearly half of US employees will continue to work remotely for at least some of the time post-pandemic.

The whole internet spins across different domains but when we talk about the backbone suite of every organization, MS Office 365, is for sure, one of the biggest contenders. Just like the recent Century Link/Lumen outage, we witnessed another major outage, this time Microsoft O365. This month might as well be considered a bad month for the internet, as we have seen a lot of daily used consumer services getting impacted like Reddit, Pinterest, Google Services, etc.

Network hardware failures. Internet outages. DDoS attacks. These are the types of disruptions you probably spend your time preparing to handle. But there’s another potential source of trouble that most IT pros think about much less frequently, and which happens far more often: employee offboarding. Whether an employee is leaving to pursue another opportunity or an employee is being terminated, you need to make sure your company’s network and data are secure.

Like many in IT, I am a big fan of Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). It’s one of those tools that you can’t really go without: it can help locate your company’s servers, desktops and mobile devices; it helps install client software, patch updates (see Microsoft Patch Tuesday); and it protects your endpoints and access control tools. All good things, but… Sometimes our beloved SCCM needs a little backup—like Robin to Batman.

Earlier this year, we shared the certified Ansible Collection for Sensu Go, which makes it easy to automate your monitoring and achieve real-time visibility into auto-scaling infrastructure. Now that Sensu Go 6 has been released, we’ll share the latest updates on the Collection, including the management aspects of Sensu Go 6, with a focus on the structure of Ansible playbooks in the Sensu Go 6 world.

The main focus for cybersecurity teams — moving beyond compliance — is to deliver the level of security required to manage the likelihood of a breach and the potential impact to the business. This is more effective than simply focusing on the cost of delivering security services.

It seems almost everything is going digital during this pandemic: businesses, education, and medical consultations. This increased digital consumption is squeezing the juice out of the IT infrastructure of many organizations. On top of that, remote work policies are posing serious security issues. At times like these, IT infrastructure monitoring is like a football game for IT admins, except: So how do you navigate all these challenges and score a touchdown?