The ELK Stack combines three tools, Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana into a complete solution that numerous organizations and teams utilize. Mastering a new tool or process can be challenging enough but learning three at once, including how these three tools interact with each other, is particularly difficult. However, to ease the learning process, there are numerous training courses and certifications for the ELK stack to help you deeply grasp how it operates and how it can be best utilized.

History has a tendency to repeat itself. This is because bad habits and anti-patterns are hard to break. And this remains the case with the latest sought-after engineering unicorn––the “Kubernetes expert”. These days, there is a veritable gold rush to hire the best and brightest Kubernetes wizards. Like all forms of expertise––this gold is rare, and as a result––is also costly. But this isn’t a new phenomenon in the technology world.

IT help desk software assists IT professionals in ensuring IT health and providing ongoing support for IT environments. It is essentially the backbone of IT operations. Since this software is vital, finding the perfect solution for your organization is key. We’ve investigated possible solutions and compiled the best IT help desk software solutions to help you find one that fits your organization’s needs.

Keeping an eye on memory usage is a must-do for system admins who want their Linux systems running at peak performance. When you're managing one server or a whole fleet, watching memory use can help you spot issues before they cause trouble for your apps or services. Linux has command-line tools and graphical ways to check memory usage, each giving you a different level of info and output style.

Not that long ago, in a galaxy that isn’t remotely far away, a disturbance in the open source world was felt with wide-ranging reverberations. Imagine waking up one morning to find out that your beloved open source tool, which lies at the heart of your system, is being relicensed. What does it mean? Can you still use it as before? Could the new license be infectious and require you to open source your own business logic? This doom’s day nightmare scenario isn’t hypothetical.

You’re probably familiar with the phrase, “software is eating the world.” In the last couple of decades, the importance and pervasiveness of technology in our society and our lives reached levels past generations would consider the realm of science-fiction. You probably have in your pocket, right now, a computer way more powerful than the one in Apollo 11.

With the digital world changing faster than ever, businesses are rushing to keep up, especially when it comes to supporting remote work. Interestingly, a report from 2023 highlighted that over 82% of businesses now support some form of remote work, underscoring the critical role of effective RMM solutions today. This makes choosing the right remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools more important than ever.

In an earlier blog, we looked at slow dependencies and how they can impact the reliability of other services. While we explored what happens when dependencies are degraded, what happens when dependencies outright fail? What can you do when your application or service sends a request to another service, and nothing comes back? We’ll answer this question by using Gremlin to proactively test a service with multiple dependencies.

Editor’s note: This blog post is the second in a series of posts about organizing your performance testing suite with Grafana k6. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the first post in the series, which explores how to implement reusable test patterns and other best practices within your testing suite.

The time has come to switch to your new network monitoring solution. Remember, if an alert, report, ticket, or notification does not spark joy, get rid of it. We’ll cover how to spin up Kentik NMS and ensure you’re ready to sunset your old solution for good.