Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Several weeks ago, my good friend Katie Nickels (Director of Intelligence at Red Canary extraordinaire) and I were chatting about Ransomware. She was super interested and passionate about some new uses of a ransomware variant named “Ryuk” (first detected in 2018 and named after a manga/anime character) [1]. I was, to be honest, much less interested. It turns out, as usual, Katie was right; this was a big deal (although as you will see, I’m right too… still dull stuff!).

With the promise of unprecedented potential, artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics have permeated into every field of business. Due to their ability to help retail staff serve customers better, personalize video recommendations based on users’ preferences, reduce employee churn, and detect fraud and security threats, AI and predictive analysis are rapidly being adapted across industry verticals.

Sleuth is a deployment tracking tool that gives you a deeper level of insight into your CI/CD workflows by tracking all of your team’s deployment tools from a single dashboard. Sleuth integrates with different components of your deployment pipeline and develops an understanding of your development processes. It can then automatically alert you as to when code is shipping, when manual approvals are needed, and when failures occur.

Amazon SQS is a message queuing service that allows you to send and receive huge numbers of messages from a queue using a simple API. Using Amazon SQS, without setting up any infrastructure, you can have a distributed and fault tolerant queuing system. Since SQS is a managed service, you have less visibility with traditional monitoring tools. As such, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring tools in AWS.

Across the technology and IT infrastructure domain, log files are recognized as often time-stamped files that can virtually record all critical information about events occurring within the purview of your IT network, OS, or other software applications. Some log files are humanly interpretable, while others are largely meant for machines to consume.

Monitoring information that matters to you will often come from disparate sources – whether you are a server engineer, a SQL database administrator, or an application owner wanting a 360 view of your applications’ health. For example, you may want to visualise your server metrics from SCOM alongside historical trends from the SCOM Data Warehouse.