Big news this week - GrafanaCon early bird tickets are now on sale! We’ve released a limited number of early bird tickets, so grab yours before they’re sold out. Also, call for proposals is open until October 15, so don’t wait until the last minute to submit your talk. We’ve gotten some great proposals already, but the more the merrier. Keep an eye out at grafanacon.org for more updates.

2017 was supposed to be the year of the Internet of Things (IoT)—the year that this highly-touted technology matured and started producing tangible results for organizations. However, the last 12 months have left advocates of IoT frustrated. A report from Cisco claims that close to 75 percent of all IoT projects fail, and IoT as a buzzword has been replaced by the likes of artificial intelligence and blockchain. This disheartening news paints a grim picture for IoT.

Our primary focus at Uptime.com is creating a tool that can monitor every critical piece of infrastructure that drives the work you do. We created a series of checks to accomplish this task, with API and Transaction checks offering unprecedented flexibility. The next step was a mechanism for controlling how alerts were issued. The Advanced Check Options we’ll look at today are aimed at controlling when and how alerts are issued.

Since version 7.0 NG 723, Pandora FMS has a new feature that allows the use of GIS maps with Geoserver for its integration with Pandora FMS GIS maps. Geoserver is a free, open source Java-based server that allows you to view, edit and share geospatial data.GIS maps with Geoserver work with the free OpenLayers library and by using the WMS (Web Map Service) standard, maps with different output formats are easily and quickly available.