As Symantec’s Principal ITSM Solutions Engineer, I was tasked 2 years ago with finding a way to quickly and effectively communicate incidents with our customers after a 4-day outage left our customers in the dark. I found Statuspage and knew it was the right tool for the job, offering a single place to send real-time updates to our customers across various channels (email, SMS, Twitter, etc.)

The job of the IT professional has become more difficult over the past decade. This is not necessarily due to the workload, but because of the dramatic shift we’ve seen in the way our organizations, employees, and customers are now operating in a software-powered world.

First, let me say that I know AWS doesn’t promise anything about network performance as it relates to packets. At best, they leave it as a multivariate calculus problem for the reader — inclusive of CPU performance, code optimization, MTU, and current network congestion under the VLANs. But still, I was curious to see if there was any correlation to Amazon’s published “Network Performance” and the actual packets per second metric I tested.

Joao Grassi — a .NET developer, front-end hobbyist, and friend of Sentry — likes .NET very much and recently tried to bring a friend to the “dark side” of .NET development. To win a point, he decided to create a small sample project using Azure DevOps. As he started, he struggled to find helpful information in the documentation (like how to control the artifact name).

While everyone prepares for the frights of Halloween, there’s a real evil lurking just out of sight—an imminent threat that grows stronger each passing day. And no amount of burning sage, sprinkling salt, or carrying garlic will ward off this threat. Gather around folks, for in October, not only do we celebrate Halloween, but also National Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

Imagine going to the store and waiting in line for 10 minutes while the cashier calls the manager over to help the customer in front of you. That is how it feels when you are waiting for a slow webpage to load. You get impatient and even contemplate moving to a new checkout line (or website). Many people want to shop, bank, and pay bills online because it is quicker. You don’t have to spend the time driving to the bank and waiting in line.

Imagine the following scenario: you’re running a small corporate website, and suddenly, your service becomes unreachable, throwing a 503 (service unavailable) http error at your customers and website visitors. The irritated messages start flooding in to support. Worried, you walk through the usual administrative checks, to make sure it’s not what you think it is. Is the webhost up?

NOTE: This is part 2 of a post on how to monitor your server. For pre-requisites and how to monitor a windows-based server, read the earlier blog post.