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How to Do Automatic Annotations with Grafana and Loki

Grafana annotations are great! They clearly mark the occurrence of an event to help operators and devs correlate events with metrics. You may not be aware of this, but Grafana can automatically annotate graphs by querying Loki. Here’s a look at how to use this feature. Loki queries can be used to automatically generate annotations on Grafana dashboards since 6.4.0. For every log line that is returned from a query, the text is automatically displayed as an annotation at the appropriate time.

Disable EBS Fast Snapshot Restores Action

A few weeks ago, Amazon announced a new feature for EBS snapshots: Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR). Normally, accessing data on new EBS volumes was quite slow as the data is lazy-loaded from S3. When Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) has been enabled on an EBS snapshot, new EBS volumes created from that snapshot will allow fast data access. While this feature is very good, it’s very expensive to keep enabled on an EBS snapshot for a long time.

Five user management best practices to improve compliance

Enterprise compliance policies begin with data. How can you better protect sensitive data—such as proprietary or customer information—by limiting access to authorized individuals? Compliance officers and IT security teams alike need tools that give them oversight and governance over user access to the company systems that store such data. Your messaging platform is no exception. Sometimes, sharing confidential information with partners and vendors is necessary to do business.

A Quick Look at ITAM and the Cloud

John F. Kennedy described the journey into space as "...the most hazardous, and dangerous, and greatest adventure of which man has ever embarked." And that can sometimes feel like it applies to cloud asset management, too! While there are many analogies one can draw between space and the cloud, the idea of a vast, seemingly limitless, expanding area where new, ever stranger, things are discovered all the time seems quite apt.

Your Status Page is Useless If You Don't Use it

Over the past several years, status pages have become more and more commonplace. They are not just a feature of the behemoth cloud providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, but common among the multitudinous rank-and-file SaaS companies that every modern business depends on. Having a well-maintained status page is not just a luxury anymore.

How to monitor Lambda functions

As serverless application architectures have gained popularity, AWS Lambda has become the best-known service for running code on demand without having to manage the underlying compute instances. From an ops perspective, running code in Lambda is fundamentally different than running a traditional application. Most significantly from an observability standpoint, you cannot inspect system-level metrics from your application servers.

CFEngine 3.10.7 LTS and 3.12.3 LTS released

We are now happy to release two new LTS versions of CFEngine, 3.10.7 LTS, and 3.12.3 LTS. This will be the last release of the CFEngine 3.10 LTS series. Standard Support of CFEngine 3.10 LTS ends end of this year. If you would like extended support, please contact us. From the CFEngine release schedule, we see that CFEngine 3.10 LTS is maintained and supported until December 28th, 2019.