An on-site switch plays a critical role in a network: that of connecting your users to the rest of the IT infrastructure. Don’t think of that jack in the wall or under the cubicle as a simple Ethernet port. As part of effective switch management, you need to think of it as the mission-critical gateway to IT services that it is.

Puppet is a Continuous Configuration Automation tool that’s you can use to automate the configuration of your entire infrastructure. You can use it to manage the configuration of anywhere from a few, to thousands of servers or devices. Puppet consists of two main components: The Puppet Server The Puppet server is where you create and store your configurations and define which nodes specific configurations will be applied to.

The Kubernetes 1.19 release candidate is now available for download and experimentation ahead of general availability later this month. You can try it now with MicroK8s. To get the latest Kubernetes on your machine, install MicroK8s and get a lightweight, zero-ops K8s cluster in no time: Or install from https://snapcraft.io/microk8s and select 1.19/candidate You can install MicroK8s on Ubuntu and all major Linux distributions or on Windows and macOS using native installers.

SIGNL4’s core job is to reliably alert operational teams. However, we’ve been asked a couple of times if SIGNL4 can also monitor a website’s uptime. Well, we developed an app and it is now available in the SIGNL4 app gallery. You can now monitor the availability of websites AND get instantly alerted if is goes down. This can be set up in minutes. The new SIGNL4 app “Website Monitoring” checks the availability of a website and queries its URL in configurable intervals.

Isn’t all logging pretty much the same? Logs appear by default, like magic, without any further intervention by teams other than simply starting a system… right?

You’re deploying Kubernetes, congratulations! This is an important first step toward a faster path to production. Your next step should be to download the new beta of VMware Tanzu Application Service. Better software does not add value unless it furthers an organization’s business goals, and regardless of what your organization’s business goals are, Kubernetes in combination with Tanzu Application Service will help you reach them.

Being in the DevOps space, we're often asked questions about software deployment like, "What's the difference between continuous deployment and continuous delivery?", "What is continuous deployment?", and "Are continuous deployment and continuous delivery the same thing?" So first, let's start by clearly defining these terms.

Are you on a conservative budget or looking to cut costs in IT? Luckily, you don’t have to look far for opportunities to save in IT. In each of the various stages of an asset life cycle, there are plenty of possible ways to save.

In helping users unify and contextualize all their observability data, Grafana is completely database-agnostic. “We believe that organizations get the best view of what’s going on when they pull in their data from wherever it lives,” said Raj Dutt, CEO of Grafana Labs, the company behind Grafana.

Wait, what? An activity log in SCOM? Did I read that right? You sure did! If you haven’t heard it yet, Microsoft recently published some auditing reports as part of SCOM 2019 UR2 that enable you to track management pack actions, override tracking, management pack objects, etc. The official Microsoft release notes are here.