Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Latest Posts

Visualizing Meltdown on AWS

On January 3, 2018, the Meltdown and Spectre CPU architecture flaws were announced to the world. Due to early leaks, the announcement was made roughly a week earlier than planned. These bugs are easily the largest vulnerabilities announced in the last decade and require a complete reassessment of microprocessor architectures, and how software and hardware interact.

Best Pingdom / UptimeRobot alternative?

Do you own website or blog and want to be informed when it becomes inaccessible? Maybe there is an issue with your web application or web server becomes unresponsive and you want to resolve issues as quickly as possible? AppBeat is right tool for you and now, for limited time, we offer you 75% discount on Standard yearly plan which includes 15 one-minute checks.

Meltdown & Spectre: How LogicMonitor Can Help

When a critical security flaw affecting hardware is identified -- such as the recently publicized chip vulnerabilities (Meltdown, Spectre) -- your cloud provider takes steps to implement the necessary patch(es) to protect its infrastructure. Updates performed by your cloud provider may require scheduled reboots for your cloud resources. For example, the security patch for Intel processors requires a machine reboot since the patch includes an update to the hypervisor kernel.

GroundWork Open Source Predicts Higher Scale IT Operations Analysis

GroundWork Open Source founder, Thomas Stocking, recently lended his expertise to APMdigest’s 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions, an insightful article about how APM and related technologies will impact business in 2018, specifically in the areas of ITOA and data.

Patching Spectre and Meltdown is Easy with AWS Systems Manager

Most likely you have heard about Spectre and Meltdown by now. It’s all over the news. As an IT or DevOps engineer, it’s now your job to patch your EC2 instance operating systems. This task can be “fun” if you need to SSH/RDP into every EC2 instance and apply patches. Or, it can be truly fun if you decide to use AWS Systems Manager to apply patches to your OS.

Amazon Athena vs. Redshift

Modern cloud-based data services have revolutionized the way companies manage their data. Tools such as Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift have changed data warehouse technology, catering for a move towards interactive, real-time, analytical solutions. Both Amazon Athena and Redshift offer their own unique benefits and use cases. Athena provides a cheaper and more portable way to query data while Redshift offers unrivalled performance and scalability.

Lessons learned with Stripe subscriptions

In June, 2014 we shipped an MVP for Cronitor that was so basic I cringe a little when I think about it. It didn’t do very much, most features were cut, but it shipped with paid subscriptions on day one. We sold one to a friend. My earliest work on subscription integration was primitive: The first month’s charge was captured during the upgrade but we created each subscription by hand in the Stripe dashboard.