For many of us, our computer is the central touchpoint of our working lives We spend hours each day typing away as we work, bringing back everything we've touched while grabbing a snack, running to the bathroom, working out at lunch, or taking a break with some coworkers. Everything you touch in a day—it all ends up back on your keyboard. As a result, your keyboard is likely one of the dirtiest things you touch all day. So, just how dirty is your keyboard?

In these times of remote teamwork, the pressure on IT teams is at its peak. So how can you ensure teams function well and conditions are good when working remotely? How do you ensure that the IT Ops teams can support the business as per usual? VPN, office suite, critical applications, videoconference, etc. The list of priorities change, new business apps need to be added while your kids and their endless energy become your face to face office colleagues. :)

On Wednesday, March 25th, we launched our Splunk for CMMC Solution with a webinar presentation to a diverse set of defense industrial base (DIB) participants and partners. As I discussed during the launch event, the Splunk for CMMC Solution provides significant out-of-the-box capabilities to accelerate organizations’ journeys to meet, monitor, track, and mature the cybersecurity practices required by the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC).

As Washington and the nation reel from the spread of COVID-19, public servants across the country are quickly adapting to the “new normal.” As described in OMB’s March 23rd memo to agency and department heads, harnessing technology to support mission continuity should be a priority.

By now, we’re all fairly aware that the ongoing crisis has changed the way people work. Businesses around the globe have adopted the remote working model. Many jobs today are compatible with remote working, with business-critical applications readily accessible through the internet. However, not all applications deployed in an organization are available through the internet. Some of them are available only on the business’ LAN due to security concerns.

We’re happy to announce that Cortex v1.0 has been released! The horizontally scalable, durable, and fast Prometheus implementation is now generally available for production use. At Grafana Labs, we’ve been using Cortex in production for almost three years, including to power the Prometheus backend for the Grafana Cloud managed logging and metrics platform.

At Squadcast, we use Grafana and absolutely love it! This blog post talks about how you can use your Grafana data to set off alert triggers in Squadcast. Turbocharge your observability data in Grafana by making it actionable.

Microservices and containers have taken the tech industry by storm. Kubernetes is one of the tools that has evolved to manage these new aspects of software development. It is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. One of the biggest challenges that organizations face when adopting Kubernetes is performing monitoring tasks in this dynamic environment.

Coronavirus has disrupted daily life for so many around the world in a shockingly short span of time. Lifestyles have shifted. A new normal, albeit a panic-stricken one, has set in. One-third of the global population is under lockdown to slow the spread of coronavirus. Many organizations have adopted temporary work-from-home measures to keep themselves up and running.

The COVID-19 virus epidemic has seen a 23% rise in visitors to UK independent ecommerce sites and similarly, on a global scale, many companies have transitioned to fully ecommerce-based business practice and are seeing an increase in online shoppers. Additionally, employees are either remote working, self-isolating or ill. This pivot in business continuity means websites are increasingly vulnerable to being attacked.