Things are about to get real in so many ways. Companies are telling employees to work from home, which sounds great in theory — less contact, less chance for the COVID-19 virus to spread. But what about the strain it’s going to place on your IT infrastructure? Your employees will be connecting over a remote virtual infrastructure (Citrix, VMware, AWS, etc) and accessing a variety of in-house web applications (Java, .NET etc.) and SaaS services (Office 365).

At this moment, billions of people are rushing to the internet for work, entertainment, shopping - everything, really. It’s great that we developed this virtual world and can keep the lights on, despite what’s happening outside. On the other hand, cloud systems and developers are under pressure to meet an unparalleled demand. At Dashbird, we have always thought developers deserve the most efficient tools to discover and resolve issues in order to keep cloud apps running smoothly.

In 2019, Google has rolled out lots of updates out of which March 2019 Core Update, June Core Update, September Search Reviews update, and BERT were the major ones. BERT update was intended to better understand long-tail and conversational search queries while June Core Update impacted the websites that failed to implement E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trust) Guidelines. On September 16, 2019, Google released a new algorithmic update to review (crawl and index) review snippets/search results.

To make sure no site content is modified or intercepted en route, HTTPS protocol is used (this is currently a must; using HTTP, insecure version, is strongly discouraged). Different versions of so called “transport security layer” protocol, known as TLS, can be used to provide the mentioned secure data exchange.

As everyone is taking proactive measures to stay healthy, organizations are increasingly having their employees work from home. At Splunk, we are focused on bringing data to every question, decision and action — and remote work for us equals Zoom for online meetings and workspaces. As our customers use Splunk for real-time data processing and analytics, they use our Splunk Mobile App (Android, iOS) when they need to take their dashboards on the go.

One of the practices being thrust into action right now is social distancing. As you would expect, this means millions of people around the world are working from home and this migration in the workforce is going to have a massive impact on the services IT practitioners must monitor and maintain in a virtual-first environment. We are already seeing reports of massive usage surges across tools like Zoom and outages in Microsoft Teams just as the COVID-19 pandemic pushes people to work from home.

As WFH usage surges, an increasing number of users will be connecting from home laptops over the internet into a Citrix server that could be hosted in a data center. This will likely put strains on licensing, internet bandwidth and server performance hosting the Citrix environment. These are all key areas that Splunk can monitor with various add-ons.

February kicked 2020 off with a terrifying glimpse into what happens when the Internet of Things stops Internetting things. If we consider our central question this year of uptime in the age of always-connected, then we start to see the impact of hidden failures. All the stuff we don’t know we know impacts the end-user. Someone forgets to renew a TLS certificate, half the business world can’t collaborate. Someone else flubs an update?

In February we released the first version of our new Icinga for Windows monitoring. Within a short amount of time we received a lot of feedback from different test and customer environments. Thanks to your testing, feedback and reports we were able to track down additional issues on the framework itself. Today we are happy to announce Icinga for Windows v1.0.1 – fixing issues especially with service user handling and one issue with the Icinga Director Self-Service API.

The work of an admin or network administrator may seem ordinary, that type of work that just follows a guide, but right now, you could not be further from truth. Here I bring you network scanning, a task that could take a lot of your time… or little, if you have Pandora FMS by your side and with the help of one of those free software applications included in GNU / Linux. Let’s take a look!