Managing services is hard for both service owners and stakeholders. To make things easier for everyone, define a clear set of expectations from the beginning. This helps measure and evaluate the health of services easier.

On the morning of September 4th, 2018 a number of customers experienced sign-in problems related to an outage for Azure, Azure AD and, in turn, Office 365. The issue was caused by an outage in Microsoft’s South Central U.S. datacenter. The problem ended up affecting customers in other regions, too, as we will see.

To protect intellectual property and trade secrets while ensuring compliance, today’s leading organizations are becoming increasingly privacy-conscious. To this end, many companies are moving away from cloud-based SaaS messaging services like Slack and Microsoft Teams to private cloud alternatives like Mattermost. That way, they’re able to maintain complete control over all of their messaging data—instead of letting vendors store that important information on their own servers.

In an earlier blog in our series on monitoring applications deployed to the Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) platform, my colleague Jeff Holmes described how AppDynamics provides an intuitive and user-friendly dashboard for a single view of all your key performance indicators for system health and availability. This broke new ground and has been warmly welcomed by our many customers who rely on PCF to run their business applications.

An MSP’s ability to do effective work depends on their technical expertise. However, their ability to ensure customer satisfaction is what really grows their business. This is because high levels of customer satisfaction retain current clients and win over future ones. Given this reality, MSPs need to be strategic about how they approach their work as every interaction is an opportunity to improve customer satisfaction.

To effectively support and manage a client’s network, you need to know what’s really on the network. Sure, a tour of the IT environment will help. You’ll be able to slowly document information about the devices you can see, like the make, model, and serial number. But what about the devices you can’t see—or that the client doesn’t know about?

Now that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), drawn up by the European Union (EU), has finally come into effect, many of the affected organizations have been scrambling to keep up with the auditing and operational requirements of a compliance regime that’s widely recognized as one of the most stringent and comprehensive regulatory frameworks ever devised for protecting data privacy.

NGINX can be used as a proxy to provide authenticated access to specific endpoints for any RESTful service API — including the Sensu API. Below I provide an NGINX configuration to grant external service provides narrow access to only create check results in the Sensu 1.4 API external service providers. But first, here's some backstory of how I got here.

Imagine that you are tasked with architecting your mission-critical cloud application. Or migrating your on-premises app to the cloud. And you ask yourself “how do the cloud savvy companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Adobe, SalesForce, etc. build and manage their modern applications?”

You can now install our very own StatusCake app on any iOS or Android device. This means you can check your test status on the go wherever you are without needing to log into email or access the StatusCake site in a mobile view! At launch the app covers Uptime, SSL and PageSpeed type tests, and you can view all of the important information for each type at a glance. All you will need to make use of this is your StatusCake username and API key.