Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As more and more of the public sector enact large-scale digital transformation initiatives, government organizations must find new ways to manage massive amounts of data securely while maintaining compliance. With new mandates from the Biden administration to enhance cybersecurity best practices in both the private and public sectors, organizations like the Department of Defense (DoD) face new challenges to their data management and communication practices.

IT admins are expected to keep the organization’s network reliable and resilient all while the complexity of today’s networks grows. From adopting hybrid infrastructures and maintaining multi-cloud environments’ security to managing ever-increasing bandwidth demands, enterprise network management is getting more difficult by day.

In the realm of virtualization, snapshots play an integral role in managing virtual machines (VMs). Essentially, a snapshot captures the state of a VM at a specific point in time, providing a reference point to which you can revert if necessary. This can be especially handy when implementing changes to your VM or its applications, allowing you to quickly undo the changes if they cause any unforeseen issues.

Cloud security is a constant concern and tends to revolve around common themes - how do you give intended users access to the data and systems their clearance allows, while maintaining a good user experience; and how do you keep unintended users or malicious bots out? In the entanglement of systems, services, and applications that make up a modern IT infrastructure, this is a lot harder to balance in practice than it is on paper.

In this article, we will deploy a clustered Prometheus setup that integrates Thanos. It is resilient against node failures and ensures appropriate data archiving. The setup is also scalable. It can span multiple Kubernetes clusters under the same monitoring umbrella. Finally, we will visualize and monitor all our data in accessible and beautiful Grafana dashboards.

Did you know that data centers are some of the most energy-intensive buildings? They consume 10 to 50 times the energy per floor space of a typical office building. As governments, industry regulators, and customers demand more energy efficient data centers, data center managers are tasked to comply with corporate sustainability initiatives by finding new ways to innovate and reduce energy consumption.

What separates successful IT teams from unsuccessful ones is the quality of their documentation. Without proper documentation, your technicians are likely to spend too much time searching for the information they need to perform tasks and resolve issues. They may make errors or respond to issues belatedly, which could impact service levels. Successful organizations ensure their documentation is always well structured, organized, accurate and up to date.

In the last post, we explain how to specify nullable elements inside our JSON. Today we will continue on the same topic, JSON Schema. This time I will speak about another Best practice, Tips, and Tricks that you must consider while designing your business processes (Logic Apps): Specifying JSON Schema required elements.