Is Ubuntu an enterprise Linux distribution? If you are asking, you are probably wondering if you can use Ubuntu anywhere else other than your workstation or development environment. Perhaps you are wondering whether you can implement Ubuntu in your enterprise, including production environments? If that is the case, I have good news for you. Yes. Ubuntu is an enterprise Linux distribution with full commercial support provided by Canonical, the publisher and maintainer of Ubuntu.

We are delighted to share a new initiative – the Ubuntu Appliance portfolio. Together with NextCloud, Mosquitto, Plex, OpenHAB and AdGuard, we have created a new class of Ubuntu derivatives: specialised appliance images that do one thing beautifully. Ubuntu Appliances transform a Raspberry Pi or PC into a secure, self-updating solution, free of charge. The Ubuntu Appliance mission is to enable secure, self-healing, single-purpose devices.

SaaS businesses are built upon the simplicity of computing, storage, and networking they provide to their users. Web and mobile applications provided by SaaS businesses are meant to be straight forward to consume for users. However, it’s important to deliver an excellent experience to your users who rely heavily on your reliability and performance. Service Level Agreements (SLA) plays an important role here.

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.

When I listen to our telecommunications customers describe their biggest frustrations, a consistent theme is the need to seamlessly connect across silos, systems, and processes. Work should be intuitive.

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.

Alerting systems centralize all IT alerts into one intuitive platform. IT alerting systems integrate with your tooling stack, and provide alert controls that help teams increase efficiency and reduce false positives. The main functions of an IT alerting system include activating incident response, automating alerts, providing intuitive reports, and enabling quick communication between roles. To enable these functions, alerting systems should be designed with quality in mind, rather than quantity.