ADFS (Active Directory Federation Services) is a solution from Microsoft for single sign-on (SSO) functionality. It is used by organizations that have their users on Windows Servers to provide authentication and authorization to web-based applications or services outside the organization. ADFS implements federated identity and claim-based access control to authenticate and authorize users, thus maintaining security.

For IT Ops people working in organizations with a truly global presence – say managed service providers, banking, finance, aviation and utilities, coherently maintaining full visibility of service health and identifying service-affecting issues can be a big headache. As a global enterprise expands and grows its operations, be it through acquisition, or during the onboarding of new customers, there’s a tendency for multiple incident management and monitoring tools to accumulate.

At first glance, microservices logging may seem simple. You just take the same principles you’ve always followed for monoliths and apply them to each microservice in your application, right? Well, no. The differences between microservices and monolithic architecture amount to much more than a difference in the number of services involved.

Tripwire, created by our friend Gene Kim, is a popular intrusion detection system (IDS) with both commercial and open source offerings. As a fun side project, I put together a Tripwire asset for Sensu. While this is more a prototype than anything else, I wanted to take this opportunity to offer some background on IDS, Tripwire, and integrating intrusion detection into your monitoring workflow, with the overall aim of illustrating how easy it is to deploy solutions with Sensu.

Recently InfluxAce Jorge de la Cruz presented on “Modern vSphere Monitoring and Dashboards Using InfluxDB, Telegraf and Grafana”. Jorge is a Systems Engineer at Veeam Software and has been using InfluxDB for years. In case you missed attending the live session, we have shared the recording and the slides for everyone to review and watch at your leisure.

The blessing and curse of cloud computing is flexibility. Now more than ever, companies leveraging the cloud are being revered for their ability to scale up usage of critical applications remotely for employees working from home, while in the same breath lambasted as IT costs sky-rocket. And in the midst of soaring usage, capacity, and cost come budget-cuts to fend off any other necessary evils during this challenging time.

How many website monitoring service providers are there, worldwide? Where are they from? What features do they offer? How much do they charge? You can learn the answers to these questions and much more from our infographic below. In May 2020, we conducted research analysing and comparing website monitoring offers from all over the world. Here is a graphical presentation of what we found out.

The entire country of China’s internet connectivity is shielded by the Great Firewall (GFW). There are three state-owned ISP providers, China Unicom, China Telecom, and China Mobile, that control internet in China. Essentially, all traffic between China and the rest of the world goes through a few national level and a handful of core level access points in different regions.

As InfluxDB continues to grow and improve, more and more developers are using it as the platform of choice for their own solutions. Most of these solutions range from filling niche internal needs to solving common problems faced by entire industries, but some of them are extraordinary for their impact, innovation, or how much they push the boundaries of what is possible with the technology. In order to recognize those, we are launching the InfluxDB Inventors program.

At Grafana Labs, we’re all big fans of the Prometheus and Grafana combination. To an extent, we just won’t shut up about it. We strongly believe in simplicity and think you shouldn’t need any extra effort to understand the metrics of your service(s) holistically. Yet we’ve all been in that situation where it is challenging to fully grasp what the metrics of our service(s) are and what they do. While naming conventions exist, at times they are not followed or enforced.