Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

SaltStack is an open source configuration management tool that lets you manage your infrastructure as code. Using SaltStack, you can manage tens of thousands of servers remotely using either a declarative language or imperative commands. It’s similar to configuration management tools such as Puppet, Chef, and Ansible.

If you even partly believe Marc Andreessen’s 2011 “software is eating the world” comment, it stands to reason that companies who are good at software will be the winners in a digital world. Given this, I find it ironic that little large-scale research has gone into what it takes to be good at software.

The Linux Audit framework is a kernel feature (paired with userspace tools) that can log system calls. For example, opening a file, killing a process or creating a network connection. These audit logs can be used to monitor systems for suspicious activity.

Simple enough to be embedded in text as a sparkline, but able to speak volumes about your business, time series data is the basic input of Anodot’s automated anomaly detection system. This article begins our three-part series in which we take a closer look at the specific techniques Anodot uses to extract insights from your data.

Scenario Linux has a number of built-in tools, commands and files which can track and store information about every user activity. These tools are common in most Linux distributions and can be used to investigate suspicious logins or failed login attempts into the system. In this article, we will talk about some of the initial methods to identify possible security breaches. We will use an Amazon EC2 instance to show these commands.

Slow websites are annoying, right? We sure think so. One common solution is to introduce a caching proxy like Varnish to help cache pages and reduce your server load. The good news is, if you have Oh Dear!, you can let those 2 work together.

When developing new applications, it’s typical to run into a variety of competitors with similar goals. This is one reason why it is not enough to create an application without ways to monitor and manage it. In fact, usually market leaders emerge rather quickly. So who are these market leaders?