Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

News over the last few years has been thick with reports of major data breaches on corporate network infrastructure. In the cases of the Panama Papers, the OPM leak, and the Hacking Team leak, the results were catastrophic leaks of extremely confidential information. In truth, a determined and well-resourced attacker can always find a way in.

Ensuring that networks and the applications they enable are performing as well as they should is a full-time and challenging task for system administrators. We've all encountered scenarios in which end-users complain that an application is slow. Then the network team says it's not their problem, and the development team (or third-party application vendor) also says it's not their problem either.

A web application firewall is an HTTP-level firewall that protects your application against well-known attacks and exploits. Using WAF, you can block traffic to your applications from certain origins and detect and block common attacks from reaching your application.

IT environments are getting increasingly complex and can often straddle on-premises gear, private cloud, public and/or multi-cloud, and SaaS environments... oh, and it’s a moving target. Your legacy applications may have to reincarnate in one of these forms with minimal disruption. And when things go wrong, you need all the help and pointers you can get to identify the root source of the problem and what it’s impacting.

For-Each is a new feature added to the DX Unified Infrastructure Management’s (DX UIM) Monitoring Configuration Service (MCS) that uses the device attributes with one or multiple values. MCS will loop through each value and create a profile for each one. If that attribute does not exist for a device, no profile will be created. Similarly, if a new value is added or removed from a device, MCS will revaluate and add or remove profiles.

Load balancing is an indispensable technique for improving a website’s performance. I’ll explain why. With Firefox’s Web Developer Tools open, I visited a popular retailer’s website to see how many HTTP requests my browser made when loading the site. In this case, I counted 119 requests needed to render the landing page.