Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

On Wednesday January 27th, 2021, Microsoft Office 365 experienced an outage affected a number of its services with a prolonged outage affecting Exchange Online.

APIs have become the de-facto standard in building and running modern applications. They are an integral part of the automation workflow of any business and as more users rely on your APIs to power their applications, the need for them to be reliable is important. Any degradation in their health, availability, and performance will impact your business, so ensuring its reliability depends on proactively monitoring your APIs.

Not a great statistic, but are bad digital experiences really that costly? A bad digital experience is when a website is slow, unreliable, and/or insecure. Is it slow to load, are there errors affecting our SEO, is a third party broken, or is payment data being stolen right from their device? These issues are all reputation damaging, more so than ever in an increasingly socially connected world.

January 20, 15:01 UTC. I was sitting in my home office, watching the screen and feeling a mix of emotion and nostalgia as a pod was getting terminated. We have thousands of pods, continuously starting and terminating, and I’m definitely not spending my days watching them, so why was this one special? The terminating ingester-0 pod was the very last Cortex ingester running on chunks storage in Grafana Labs’ infrastructure.

What are the most important database performance metrics, and how do you monitor them? This is a question many IT professionals would like the answer to. We can collect and use a wide range of database metrics to analyze database and server resource consumption, not to mention overall usage. You are probably wondering why this is essential for business, so let’s explore this next.

A recent privilege escalation heap overflow vulnerability (CVSS 7.8), CVE-2021-3156, has been found in sudo. sudo is a powerful utility built in almost all Unix-like based OSes. This includes Linux distributions, like Ubuntu 20 (Sudo 1.8.31), Debian 10 (Sudo 1.8.27), and Fedora 33 (Sudo 1.9.2). This popular tool allows users to run commands with other user privileges.

As with any service in the cloud – particularly Microsoft 365 – it’s difficult to determine where along the path from user to Microsoft service lies the source of a service delivery problem. Without visibility into the entire spectrum of possible root causes – from endpoint to Microsoft cloud service – it’s nearly impossible to respond and potentially remediate the issue.

Modern applications are changing, and traditional testing practices are no longer up to the task. Learn more about the changing landscape of QA and how Chaos Engineering provides the necessary framework for testing modern applications.

A cloud-first strategy can feel like a big jump from traditional setups. One of the benefits of a hybrid or on-premises strategy is you feel like you’re in control. You and your team know where your critical servers live. You can touch them. Your team understands your security processes, and you can easily verify security personnel follow them. Those are all significant benefits. However, a growing number of software teams are choosing to move to cloud-first strategies.

If you’re already using or planning to use AWS Lambda to run code without provisioning or managing servers, you’ll want to monitor your serverless applications with the new SolarWinds® AppOptics™ Lambda forwarder and APM agents. If you’re not using AWS Lambda, here’s what you need to know—it’s an event-driven, serverless computing platform by Amazon Web Services.