Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2022

The PwnKit vulnerability: Overview, detection, and remediation

On January 25, 2022, Qualys announced the discovery of a local privilege escalation vulnerability that it identified as PwnKit. The PwnKit vulnerability affects PolicyKit’s pkexec, a SUID-root program installed by default on many Linux distributions. The same day of the announcement, a proof of concept (PoC) exploit was built and published by the security research community.

Elevate AWS threat detection with Stratus Red Team

A core challenge for threat detection engineering is reproducing common attacker behavior. Several open source and commercial projects exist for traditional endpoint and on-premise security, but there is a clear need for a cloud-native tool built with cloud providers and infrastructure in mind. To meet this growing demand, we’re happy to announce Stratus Red Team, an open source project created to emulate common attack techniques directly in your cloud environment.

Monitor CDN performance within your Synthetic tests

Content delivery networks (CDNs) reduce latency by delivering cached data (e.g., JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos) from a network of linked proxy servers to end users around the globe. CDNs help reduce the load on your origin servers and shorten the distance that data needs to travel, thus improving the end-user experience.

Run Datadog Synthetic tests in your Jenkins pipelines

Continuous integration (CI) has become the mainstream approach to software development as it enables organizations to iterate quickly while minimizing the risk of releasing faulty code. To implement CI, many organizations rely on Jenkins—one of the most mature and widely used automation servers on the market. Jenkins comes with hundreds of community-backed plugins to help you easily integrate it with other tools in your development workflow.

Datadog Cloud Security Platform

Datadog's Cloud Security Platform—consisting of Cloud SIEM, Posture Management, and Workload Security—delivers real-time threat detection and continuous configuration audits across your applications, hosts, containers, and cloud infrastructure. Datadog derives security insights from your observability data, enabling security and DevOps teams to work together to detect, investigate, and remediate threats.

Designing production-ready AWS serverless applications

Serverless has become an increasingly popular paradigm among organizations looking to modernize their applications as it allows them to increase agility while reducing their operational overhead and costs. But the highly distributed nature of serverless architectures requires developers to rethink their approach to application design and development. AWS-based serverless applications hinge on AWS Lambda functions, which are stateless and ephemeral by design.

Best practices for building serverless applications that follow AWS's Well-Architected Framework

In part 1 of this series, we looked at common design principles and patterns for assembling microservices in serverless environments. But when it comes to building serverless applications, designing your architecture is only part of the challenge. You also have to ensure that each of your individual functions and services are secure, reliable, and highly performant—without incurring enormous costs.

Datadog NPM now supports Consul networking

Consul is a service networking platform from HashiCorp that helps you manage and secure communication between microservices. You can use Consul with Kubernetes, and it supports on-prem, hybrid, and multi-cloud architectures. Consul service mesh provides a control plane which allows you to automate the management of traffic between your services via features like service discovery, DNS, load balancing, and routing.

Monitor Dell EMC Isilon with Crest Data Systems' integration in the Datadog Marketplace

Dell EMC Isilon is a petabyte-scale network attached storage (NAS) system that allows you to archive unstructured data. Isilon operates in a cluster to provide high availability, and you can scale up its throughput, IOPS, and storage space by adding nodes to your cluster. Isilon automatically replicates your data throughout the cluster to ensure durability and provides caching to minimize data retrieval latency.

Run Synthetic tests in CI/CD with the new Datadog GitHub Action

Testing early and often throughout the software development process (shift-left testing) helps teams stay agile and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new updates. Datadog Synthetic CI/CD Testing enables you to implement shift-left testing throughout your CI/CD pipeline so that your team can prevent faulty code deployments from degrading your end user experience.

Debug source code in real time with Rookout's Datadog App

Earlier this year we launched Datadog Apps, which seamlessly integrate functionality from third-party tools into Datadog’s centralized monitoring platform. This project has enabled us to collaborate with some of our partners, such as PagerDuty and LaunchDarkly, to extend the Datadog UI and provide our customers with new solutions for incident management, feature flag optimization, and more.

Key metrics for monitoring Azure SQL databases

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) database offering for modern cloud applications. It’s a fully managed service that runs on the latest version of the SQL Server database engine, enabling you to create highly available and performant database instances without needing to maintain hardware upgrades, patches, or backups.

Tools for collecting Azure SQL Database data

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed key metrics for monitoring Microsoft Azure SQL databases. We also looked at how your database resource and audit logs complement metrics to provide more insight into database performance, activity, and security. In this post, we’ll show you how to collect metrics and logs from your database instances and monitor them with Azure’s monitoring and reporting tools.

Monitor Azure SQL databases with Datadog

In Part 2 of this series, we showed you how to monitor Azure SQL Database metrics and logs using the Azure platform. In this post, we will look at how you can use Datadog to monitor your Azure SQL databases alongside other technologies in your infrastructure. Datadog provides turn-key integrations for Azure along with more than 500 other technologies, enabling you to track long-term performance trends across all systems in your infrastructure, not just your SQL databases.