Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you’re a CFO or finance leader at a company that uses public cloud services like AWS, chances are you’ve had a bill cross your desk that may seem confusing. You or your team of financial analysts may have frequent conversations with engineering about how AWS services are allocated across different engineering initiatives.

The principles of data protection are the same whether your data sits in a traditional on-prem data center or in a cloud environment. The way you apply those principles, however, are quite different when it comes to cloud security vs. traditional security. Moving data to the cloud introduces new attack-surfaces, threats, and challenges, so you need to approach security in a new way.

Ansible is an automation tool for provisioning, managing, and deploying infrastructure and applications. When building large-scale applications, Ansible enables users to manage and configure their infrastructure across platforms like AWS. Whether you rely on temporary or dedicated hosts, you can use Ansible to create a repeatable process for configuring them with the Datadog Agent.

Amazon CloudFront is a CDN that allows you to serve content from edge locations without having to actually stand up infrastructure around the world. However, since it’s a managed service, you have less visibility with traditional monitoring tools. As such, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring tools in AWS. In this post, we’ll explain how to use CloudWatch to monitor CloudFront and what is important to watch.

As many of you know, Gartner is recognized as one of the premier analyst firms by most enterprise IT organizations. Given the broad and diverse set of customers Gartner serves -- many risk averse and conservative towards new technologies, Gartner generally tends to recommend incremental and measured changes. Imagine our surprise when Gartner made this very bold statement "on-premises is the new legacy.

AWS CloudWatch allows you to collect log files such as the Apache2 access or error logs from your AWS EC2 instances. This is especially useful if you have a scaling group of instances behind a load balancer. Rather than connecting to each instance and manually searching the logs with grep, CloudWatch centralises the logs into one log stream, allowing you to search all your log files from one place.

Amazon recently announced EventBridge to much fanfare. Although, in truth, it’s a rebranding of the existing CloudWatch Events service, along with some new features. But rebranding might be exactly what this old dog needs!