Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Our company is using Icinga for quite some time now to monitor our whole infrastructure and its customers infrastructure. We deploy many Icinga instances for different teams and customers (see this video for more information). To manage the configuration of these instances, we use the Icinga Director module. This gives us an easy way to deploy checks, services and hosts in Icinga. The teams do not have access to the configuration files of Icinga, so every change is done via the Director frontend.

In the context of businesses, the ultimate goal of innovation for technology companies is to drive a profit. This means that even though many software engineering problems can be solved with enough time and budget — just because a business can solve a problem doesn’t mean that they should. Sometimes, even once a team has figured out how to solve an engineering problem, it doesn’t make sense to deploy the solution — because it costs so much to operate.

Across the IT community, there is a buzz around the SaaSOps movement, and it has been consistently gaining momentum. As David Politis of BetterCloud describes it: “SaaSOps is a practice referring to how Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are managed and secured through centralized and automated operations (Ops), resulting in reduced friction, improved collaboration, and better employee experience”.

It was over a month ago that I promised we would tie together Splunk Security Content and the Splunk Attack Range to automatically test detections. Ultimately, using these projects together in a Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) workflow with CircleCI brings the rigors of software development to the SOC and truly treats 🛡detection as code. Well, I want to share how we have failed at achieving this goal.

During my tenure at Puppet, I’ve learned that almost everything we do is focused on two things — eliminating soul-crushing work, and the never-ending desire to solve really hard customer problems. Couple those with the positive and energetic attitude of the Puppet team, and we’re bound to have a profound impact on our customers. Maybe I’ve had too much Kool-Aid?