Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You started with Ansible, and for a long time it was the only thing you needed. With a handful of playbooks and an inventory file, you got the job done. However, as the fleet grew, runs went from taking minutes to hours, and parts of the inventory were unreachable at any given moment. This is not an Ansible flaw. Push-based configuration and continuous state enforcement are simply two different jobs. This blog post is all about getting you started with a hybrid system.

In the August 2026 SecureIQLab Cloud WAAP v5.0 CyberRisk Validation Comparative Report, Harness Web Application & API Protection (WAAP) was named a Leader. The analysis involves actual lab testing across 12 leading Cloud WAAP vendors and shows scores for each criterion evaluated — and we're thrilled to be one of just six vendors to earn Leader status, and one of only five to meet both of SecureIQLab's "Secure by Design" and "Secure by Default" criteria.

Every major security information and event management (SIEM) platform prices on the volume of data you send it. Microsoft Sentinel meters per gigabyte across two tiers. Splunk charges per gigabyte indexed or per compute unit. Google SecOps draws down a prepaid gigabyte credit balance. Elastic Security bills ingest plus retention, or the resources your cluster consumes. Three of the four keep their real rates quote-only. Budgeting starts with the meter.

Ask a platform team why their application logs aren't in their observability backend and you'll often get a one-sentence answer: And, that's where the conversation ends. The logs stay in a silo. Or, they don't get collected at all. The team loses the troubleshooting signal, and nobody revisits the decision because the alternative looks like a compliance violation. Application logs in healthcare, aviation, insurance, and retail are full of personal information that should not be stored in plain text.

Internal hackathons are a powerful way to let your teams explore ideas and work together on something fun besides the same old stuff for work. Maybe they want to build something brand new, maybe they want to knock out things that are on the backlog that never get prioritized, or maybe they want to work on something fun but completely unrelated to work.

Why do so many patching programs pass every internal check and still come back from an Essential Eight assessment rated at Maturity Level One? The answer is rarely speed. Teams that miss the mark are usually patching their servers, browsers, and office suites on schedule, then losing the rating on the fifty applications nobody put on a list. Maturity Level Two is where the Essential Eight stops asking how fast you patch and starts asking how much you can see.