Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As the world moves towards the “new normal” on account of the pandemic, numerous adjustments and recalibrations have been made in all aspects of our lives, including the organizations we are part of. As businesses base their operations on a dispersed workforce beyond the corporate perimeter, IT teams have been the ones largely enabling this successful migration to home workspaces and further sustaining the remote network to foster productivity.

You hear about APIs (application program interfaces) everywhere now, and even if you don’t know what one is, you’ve probably heard the term more than once. In this article, we cover a few API basics, and we talk a bit about why you should use API monitoring if you publish or have an API that is critical to your business.

Our sources state that there has been a 20% increase in web-skimming attacks since the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. Recently, we have witnessed some high-profile Magecart attacks on websites which have gained popularity during the pandemic, including fitness-based websites. The latest fitness-based website attack reported is YogaFit, who were compromised for over 6 weeks.

When it comes to troubleshooting application performance, metrics are no longer enough. To fully understand the environment you need logs and traces. Today, we’re going to focus on your Java applications.

You know the feeling. You’ve just deployed a new version to production and are monitoring the Rollbar dashboard for any new errors or looking out for any Slack notifications. You’re keeping an eye on the number of new or reactivated errors, their severity level, and triaging to see which errors need to be assigned and to whom. Now what if you could automate these tasks?

When monitoring third-party applications with Prometheus, you’ll need an exporter if the application doesn’t already expose metrics in the appropriate format. How do you find an appropriate exporter, and once you have your exporters, how should you organize your label taxonomies to reflect your infrastructure? Many applications in the systems you’re in charge of will be third-party applications, which do not natively expose Prometheus-formatted metrics.

The new release of FortiOS 6.4 from 31 March 2020 brings a new and interesting feature of using webhooks for external API calls and enable automation stitches, which are easy to configure in FortiGate UI and allow you to run multiple actions. This led us to revise our integration script to utilize this functionality and allow administrators to easily configure different levels of mitigation with the webhooks.

The pandemic has changed the way teams collaborate within an organization and between companies. With work from home becoming the new normal, employees are turning to new options for collaboration, meeting, training and onboarding have moved online. The office is now a virtual space. With the increasing demand for online meetings, it is even more important to monitor the health and performance of such meetings.