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?

The experts from Azure Functions team has yet again joined us for the monthly webcast. Given the unprecedented time, this webcast happened a bit unusual where the folks joined from their home rather from Channel 9 studio and which made this webcast even more unique and exciting. In this session, Jeff Hollan, Eduardo and Alex Karcher have joined to give us the picture of the latest happenings in the Azure Functions space.

On-call: you may see it as a necessary evil. When responding to incidents quickly can make or break your reputation, designating people across the team to be ready to react at all hours of the day is a necessity, but often creates immense stress while eating into personal lives. It isn’t a surprise that many engineers have horror stories about the difficulty of carrying a pager around the clock. But does on-call have to be so dreadful? We think not.

Detailed and specific description of impact? Check. In-depth root cause analysis? Check. Clearly defined and easy to follow resolution? Check. Postmortems present an incredible learning opportunity, despite the inherent cost of time and effort. They ensure an incident is documented, that all contributing factors are understood, and that effective preventative actions have been put in place to reduce the likelihood or impact of recurrence.

Kubernetes 1.18 is about to be released! After the small release that was 1.17, 1.18 comes strong and packed with novelties. Where do we begin? There are new features, like the OIDC discovery for the API server and the increased support for Windows nodes, that will have a big impact on the community. We are also happy to see how some features that have been on Alpha state for too long are now being reconsidered and prepared for the spotlight, like Ingress or the API Server Network Proxy.

Elasticsearch provides a powerful set of options for querying documents for various use cases so it’s useful to know which query to apply to a specific case. The following is a hands-on tutorial to help you take advantage of the most important queries that Elasticsearch has to offer. In this guide, you’ll learn 42 popular query examples with detailed explanations, but before we get started, here’s a summary of what the types of queries we’ll tackle.

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.