Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Securing SQL Server with DoD STIGs

Making sure your SQL Servers are secured against malicious users is difficult. How can you know that you’ve done enough? How do you know you’re protected from the things that actually worry you? The United States Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) publishes a set of guidelines for organizations securing different pieces of software that connect to the US Department of Defense’s networks (DoD).

Multi-cloud monitoring: A quick recap

The year 2020 was a tough one and tested the grit and resilience of the human race. Organizations across the globe had to prioritize the safety of employees, customers, and associates. The rapid response to COVID-19 has enabled millions to work remotely because of advanced cloud computing technologies supplied through public cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Elastic is going closed-source. Where does that leave MSSPs?

Elastic moved from an open source license for Elasticsearch and Kibana to a “source available” (aka closed source) license. It was supposed to shut down SaaS companies, but what does it mean for Managed Security Service Providers? Managed Security Service Providers, or MSSPs, are a growing segment in the security business. These firms specialize in deploying security infrastructure, aggregating monitoring and event data, and proactively hunting threats.

System Traceability: What is It and How Can You Implement It?

System traceability is one of the three pillars of observability stack. The basic concept of observability is of operations, which include logging, tracing, and displaying metrics. Tracing is intuitively useful. Identify specific points in an application, proxy, framework, library, runtime, middleware, and anything else in the path of a request that represents the following of either ‘forks’ in execution flow and/or a hop or a fan out across network or process boundaries.

Farewell, worldPing. Hello, Grafana Cloud synthetic monitoring!

Many of us get sentimental about past projects we’ve worked on…for me it is a mobile dashboard that leveraged ML/AI to help a sales team make quicker decisions while in the field (nerdy, I know…but it was one of my first projects as a UX Designer when I was starting out my career, and I have many fond memories about this project). For many members of the team at Grafana Labs, that sentimental project is worldPing.

Redgate commits to the future of PASS

When PASS announced in December last year that it was ceasing all operations from January 16, 2021, it came as a surprise to many people. For 21 years, it’s represented a global community of over 300,000 data professionals who use the Microsoft data platform. From the PASS Summit to online learning, SQLSaturdays to opportunities to network, its’s been a permanent fixture throughout the year.

Introducing GitHub Discussions for CFEngine

We are excited to announce that CFEngine is now using GitHub Discussions. GitHub Discussions is a feature of GitHub repos, and similar to Q&A platforms like Stack Overflow, and other online forums. After testing it out for a few weeks we are pleased with how it works and want to encourage all our users to try it.

Kubernetes Observability Challenges: The Need for an AI-Driven Solution

Kubernetes provides abstraction and simplicity with a declarative model to program complex deployments. However, this abstraction and simplicity create complexity when debugging microservices in this abstract layer. The following four vectors make it challenging to troubleshoot microservices.

Top Windows Server Parameters to Monitor

The server operating system (OS) is dominated by two companies. Red Hat, the first one, dominates the open-source server market. While Windows, the second one, dominates the closed-source market. According to a 2018 study by T4, Microsoft controls 47.8% of the industry share, whereas Red Hat controls only 33.9% of the market. The remaining 18.3% is controlled by alternative server OSs. Windows server monitoring has become a hot topic.