Log files are vital to your organization. From helping organizations troubleshoot IT issues, to investigating security incidents, to locating an application error or isolating an underperforming component, the information that you need to make your life easier is on your logs.

If your data center experienced an outage due to an ISP problem, the first thing you probably do is go to a terminal and execute your nifty command line tools. These tools give you a lot of information, textually. However, troubleshooting network outages aren't always easy, as slow connections or outages may be caused by issues outside your corporate network and parsing all this data is hard.

The ability to visualize your IT infrastructure from end to end is critical in fostering successful operations and delivery of service. Being a network admin, you need to keep a close eye on all your network devices, whether they're across the globe or inside your data centers. However, this is difficult to do without an actual location-based topology map of your network infrastructure.

One of the biggest challenges in a self-provisioned, public cloud environment like Amazon Web Services (AWS) is finding the right balance between resources, performance, and cost. With no initial visibility into usage stats, AWS customers tend to overprovision compute, storage, and database resources to cushion sudden spikes in demand. If users could see resource usage, they'd be able to determine if the numbers provisioned are really in line with the application workload.

Function as a service (FaaS) products like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions, and Google Cloud Functions have instigated a paradigm shift in the way Ops teams provision and manage their organization's infrastructure. With everyday administrative tasks like provisioning, patching, maintaining compliance, and configuring operating systems all being abstracted away, your Ops team only has one task to work on - writing world-class code.

Being organized is a critical aspect of IT infrastructure monitoring and management. Our Monitor Groups and Subgroups feature gave you the flexibility to group resources by a business application. With our recent launch of tags in Site24x7, you'll now be able to organize your resources by technology and other segments. So let's dive in and learn a bit more about tags, its features, and some basic tagging strategies.

As you probably know, Site24x7's AWS monitoring capabilities provide complete visibility into resource utilization and performance for key compute resources, storage, and database services powering your application in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. From here on out, you'll have the power to not only identify issues that might affect application performance, but also automatically invoke operational tasks across multiple AWS resources to resolve them quickly.

Introducing Site24x7's Guidance Report for AWS, your very own personal cloud consultant to help you get the most out of your AWS investment. So, what does this new Guidance Report offer? Well, it helps you follow certain industry best practices related to AWS. How? By checking your AWS account and resources against a list of curated best practice recommendations.