McKenzie Intelligence Services (MIS) is a company specializing in damage assessment post-disasters. Their platform, the Global Events Observer (GEO), offers comprehensive coverage of natural and manmade disasters worldwide, such as hurricanes, floods, civil unrest, and rioting. MIS provides an expert-assessed view of the world through analysts who analyze various imagery sources, including satellite and street-level imagery.

Stuck in a sales slump? Any seasoned reseller can tell you that there comes a time for any growing business when you’ve poured your heart into attracting customers and perfecting the shopping experience, only to see your sales numbers stagnate. It’s absolutely maddening but certainly not unmanageable. Sometimes, it’s not about the marketing or the product—it’s all about site performance.

You may have seen webhooks mentioned in some of your apps before and thought: “Would I benefit from using a webhook?” In a word: yes. In simple terms, webhooks are an easy way for one app to “speak” to another, allowing data to be passed between systems that are otherwise unconnected. Applications and services such as Twitter, Discord, Youtube, and Github all use webhooks to provide you with the services you know and love. So that begs the question: how do I use webhooks?

Uptime.com’s Private Location monitoring tools offer a powerful solution for keeping an eye on internal endpoints. Though these services and their importance aren’t visible to the public, internal teams and customers may still rely heavily on internal services in their day-to-day functions and downtime can disrupt operations just as much as public-facing incidents.

In a recent unexpected turn of events, a faulty component in the latest CrowdStrike Falcon update led to widespread outages, crashing Windows systems globally. The repercussions were felt across various sectors, including airports, TV stations, hospitals, and even emergency services in the U.S. and Canada. The glitch, affecting both Windows workstations and servers, resulted in massive outages, bringing entire companies to a standstill and crashing fleets of hundreds of thousands of computers.

The recent global outage caused by an operating system update reminded me of how vulnerable we are today and most importantly, how close we are always teetering on global scale incidents with millions of interconnected dependencies. When the base of the house collapses, everything built on top is impacted. Those of us in IT Operations, Monitoring, Observability (insert the current acronym), etc., know firsthand this risk; we face it every day.

Availability monitoring and alerting is a vital part of any organization’s reliability strategy. Monitoring the current and most recent version of a webpage is essential to guarantee that visitors are seeing the most up-to-date content and information, and by the same token, that the monitoring solution is checking the most up-to-date version of a page. This is where browser caching in the context of CDNs (content delivery networks) can occasionally cause monitoring headaches.