Cloud computing offers several undeniable benefits to businesses. Some of the biggest ones are agility, cost savings, data recovery, and developing new apps and services to meet changing customer needs. Despite these benefits, the cloud can be complex, demand specialized skills, and require companies to follow up-to-date cloud security best practices. Why is that a problem? A 2020 report shows that 68% of companies cited misconfiguration as their biggest cloud architecture challenge going into 2021.

Since the launch of uptime monitoring, we have received a lot of positive feedback. There were also a couple of much-requested additional features that we hope to address in this huge update.

Open Telemetry represents an effort to combine distributed tracing, metrics and logging into a single set of system components and language-specific libraries. Recently, OpenTelemetry became a CNCF incubating project, but it already enjoys quite a significant community and vendor support. OpenTelemetry defines itself as “an observability framework for cloud-native software”, although it should be able to cover more than what we know as “cloud-native software”.

A few days ago I received an inquiry about a scripting problem from one of our longtime partners, to be exact our DCP Marc Handel from IT unlimited AG. In the exchange with Marc I realized that his idea to use the Enterprise Alert Scripting Host, the Windows Task Scheduler and CheckMK to realize a roundtrip monitoring could be interesting for the whole community. Especially for all our CheckMK customers.

In order to produce their masterpieces, artists like van Gough, Rembrandt, Picasso, and Monet painted with more than just one color. Being able to choose from multiple colors (not to mention an abundance of talent, inspiration, and creativity) is what allowed these artists to see their complete vision come to life on canvas. However, if you’re relying on a single set of data to troubleshoot network issues, it’s like you’re stuck painting with one color.

Mission creep is a phenomenon that occurs after a project begins and gains momentum, but then gradually grows beyond the original, intended scope. One day you wake up and realize that, instead of an efficient, manageable project, you’ve got a monster on your hands. For enterprises in the midst of dynamic growth, IT infrastructure is often beset by mission creep. The incumbent organization acquires smaller operations, integrates their technology, and soon things are out of control.

Observability data, and especially log data, is immensely valuable for modern business. Making the right decision—from monitoring the bits and bytes of application code to the actions in the security incident response center—requires the right people to generate insights from data as fast as possible.