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Bad Observability

Observability has become a bit of a buzzword in the industry for the last few years. Exactly what "observability" means depends on who you ask, but most people would agree its about both: There's plenty of content out there telling you how to implement observability, or what good looks like. But what about bad observability? What are some anti-patterns to watch out for?

Grafana vs. Power BI vs SquaredUp

You’re part of a data-driven engineering team. You have a rich, complex, and dynamic set of tools but you’re struggling to discover and share insights from all that data. So, you're looking for a platform that will help unify it all. Naturally, you want to compare Grafana vs. Power BI - the big names. Plus, there's a new player on the block - SquaredUp.

SCOM integration with OpenAI Chat GPT

We are happy to announce that we have created a SCOM integration with OpenAI Chat GPT. The solution checks for any alert generated in SCOM and then requests the artificial intelligence service to give you possible root causes and fixes to solve the issue. Moreover, it will take into account any other issues the respective degraded component or service is experiencing and consult you accordingly.

NiCE Oracle Management Pack 5.3 released

Oracle is a highly performant and reliable multi-model database management system running online transaction processing, data warehousing, and mixed database workloads. Although Oracle environments are reliable and performant, monitoring dedicated Oracle on-premise or cloud deployments is crucial to safeguard business continuity.

Your PKI infrastructure is worthless if ...

A common mistake IT organizations make, is having a well-designed Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), but at the same time having client devices, such as monitoring agents for your Citrix NetScalers, which accept to set up any encrypted connection, to any device, no matter what certificate they are presenting. In this case, you basically allow connections to be made to devices you do not know whether they can be trusted. This makes you vulnerable for 'spoofing'.

New Year's (observability) Resolutions

A new year has started and I've been pondering my hopes and dreams for the year to come. In the world of SRE, observability is the most prominent pillar of my work. So, I decided to drill into the topic of observability and what I'd like to see happen in the industry in 2023. Rather than focusing on any tool, technology, or methodology, I'lll be exploring concepts that can be broadly applied in any organization.

High Citrix logon durations

Every Citrix VAD/DaaS engineering team is responsible for a healthy Citrix VAD or DaaS deployment (yes also DaaS). But the most important task is providing great user experience. Is the team sure end users are actually getting that great user experience? Can they prove it? Are they going to be alarmed immediately whenever they are not and find the root cause quickly? Does the team know which users are affected.

Monitor VDA machines and sessions agentless with SCOM

Every Citrix engineer knows it is quite a burden to install, configure and update monitoring agent software on Citrix VDA machines as this requires you to create and deploy new master images every time you need to deploy a new agent version. While it requires some manual actions, the SCOM platform does natively support monitoring through agentless managed devices which you can onboard with the SCOM discovery wizard.

Citrix HDX Teams Redirection Service is not running

The Citrix HDX Teams Redirection Service is part of the Citrix Virtual Desktop Agent software since version 1906. The service runs on a VDA machine (single- or multi-session) and provides redirection services which offload audio, video and screensharing in Microsoft Teams for optimizing the user experience for Microsoft Teams when used within the VDA.