This week we share news about the Azure Data Explorer plugin for Grafana, updates to the GrafanaCon LA speaker list, new functionality added to the polystat panel plugin and more.

Threat hunting is proactively identifying and thwarting unusual network activity that could indicate an attempted security breach. It's a historically manual activity, making it time-intensive and arduous. It’s no wonder, then, why most organizations don’t have the time, budget, or resources to undertake it effectively…if at all.

Let’s set the scene – an IT professional just received a critical alert, notifying him of an urgent matter. Unfortunately, due to a distracting social event, this professional is completely unaware of the notification. Even worse, he receives incident alerts via email, a communication method which doesn’t have the ability to forward the alert to another person if he doesn’t respond within a short time frame. Maybe he should stop attending social events.

To build stable and flexible software, we need to keep software design principles in mind. Having error-free code is essential. However, well-designed software architecture is just as important. SOLID is one of the most well-known sets of software design principles. It can help you avoid common pitfalls and think about your apps’ architecture from a higher level.

Configuration management is an essential process for DevOps teams. It allows engineers to manage dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of machines in a consistent and automated way. While there are many configuration management tools available, three of the most popular are Chef, Puppet, and Ansible. In this post, we’ll explain how these tools work and the unique benefits that they offer.

A few months back, I blogged about my experience arriving at Stackery after code school. Months later, each day is still interesting and challenging and I’m so glad to have decided to pursue serverless as my concentration. I credit my AWS certifications for narrowing my focus enough to lead me to this point. The serverless community puts so much emphasis on exploration and getting started on your work or experiments today that, getting some exposure to AWS, you can get started right away.

Out of the box, Sentry notifies you about crashes in your JavaScript apps and gives you useful tools to help you debug what your app was doing when it broke. If Sentry stopped there, it would still be great and valuable, but it’s possible to maximize your front-end debugging potential with just a few manual optimizations.

Unicast Flooding Traffic is associated with the learning process of network switches. In fact, with this method, switches identify the MAC addresses of the devices that are accessible by each of their ports, thus constructing a table that will then be used to decide the destination of each frame that arrives at the switch.

The search-first problem-solving approach—meaning “open up the log search tool” (Splunk, ELK, Loggly, SumoLogic, Scalyr, etc)—is a costly and time-consuming operation during which the true source of a problem is rarely pinpointed in short order. Log search tools require work by the user to transform text strings into fields that are ready for statistical analysis.

One perennial problem we face in monitoring is dealing with noise. We don't want to miss important signals, but sorting through all the noise can be a chore. Ideally, we want to spend as little time as possible doing the setup work needed to achieve excellent signal-to-noise ratio. The feature we've just released will help you get closer to that optimal setup faster, with less work.