If you remember getting an Erector Set as a kid, I’m sorry. In a stocking full of toy building systems, an Erector Set is the proverbial lump of coal. The instructions are complicated, and the pieces are made of metal, connected together with tiny screws. Few children have ever completed one of these sets successfully.

Network performance monitoring and diagnostics (commonly referred to as NPM or NPMD) tools are valuable for IT Ops teams that want to maintain visibility into the health and performance of their networking infrastructure. They provide this visibility in two major ways: by retrieving diagnostic data from network infrastructure components (such as routers and switches) and by analyzing network traffic flow and quality of service through various techniques (such as deep packet inspection).

A couple weeks ago, we released the Helm chart and docker images so you could install StackStorm Enterprise HA cluster in Kubernetes. Today, we’re glad to announce that the Community free and open source edition of StackStorm HA is now available, too!

With an almost 20-year career in social services—including working in institutions such as The University of Chicago, the United States Peace Corps, Chicago public schools, Child Protective Services, the Catholic Church, and for the U.S. federal government in probation and parole programs—my leap into Silicon Valley was as much a culture shock as the 2.5 years I lived in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador.

You probably use many tools to get you through the day. Do you ever wonder what tools get other people through their days? In our Tools This Engineer Uses series, we explore the routines, systems, and tools (of course) that people rely on to solve problems and accomplish goals.

Rollbar introduced Versions a few months ago, providing developers a way to easily see whether their most recently deployed code changes are introducing new or reactivated errors. As a follow-on improvement, we've updated our Deploys API so you can notify Rollbar immediately when starting a deploy as well as when it completes.

AUSTIN, Texas — October 9, 2018 — Today at SpiceWorld 2018, Spiceworks unveiled how new artificial intelligence capabilities are being used to power personalized experiences at scale and more directly connect technology buyers and sellers in the $3 trillion IT industry. The AI capabilities enable Spiceworks to connect technology buyers with the people, tools, and information they need to support their organizations with confidence.

AUSTIN, Texas — October 9, 2018 — Today at SpiceWorld 2018, Spiceworks announced a new cloud-based Spiceworks Inventory application that integrates with the cloud editions of Spiceworks Help Desk and Spiceworks Remote Support to help IT professionals more intuitively manage their technology assets and support end users from a single, easy-to-use ecosystem.

I’ve had the chance to work in the cloud, virtualization, and application delivery industry for quite some time. The most amazing thing I’ve seen has been the evolution around delivery technologies specifically aimed at improving user experience and performance. Still, with varying operating systems, evolving desktop environments, and the constant challenges around applications – there’s still one major challenge when it comes to these ecosystems.

Here at Sematext we use Java and rely on Logsene, our hosted ELK logging SaaS, a lot. We like them so much that we regularly share our logging experience with everyone and help others with logging, especially, ELK stack. Centralized logging plays nice with Java (and anything else that can write pretty logs). However, there is one tricky thing that can be hard to get right: properly capturing exception stack traces.