AMMP Technologies runs monitoring for energy systems, usually off mini-grids in Africa. The company uses Grafana to monitor interface with physical objects that are not servers or containers. “It’s interesting how a toolkit for visualizing essentially internet/computer/server metrics is so well-suited to working with real-life streaming data,” AMMP Cofounder Svet Bajlekov said during his talk at GrafanaCon L.A.

Cloud computing is well past the emerging stage. It’s no longer a radical idea for businesses to depend on cloud platforms and services to serve as their technology backbone--and the numbers show it. In 2018, Forrester reported that nearly 60% of North American enterprises rely on public cloud platforms. This year, Gartner projects that the public cloud services market will grow from last year’s $182.4 billion to $214.3 billion this year, a 17.5% jump.

Internet security, in general, is a challenge that we have been dealing with for decades. It is a regular topic of discussion and concern, but a relatively new segment of internet security is getting the lion’s share of attention—internet of things (IoT). So why is internet of things security… a thing?

There seems to be a smart version of everything these days. From coffee machines to aquarium thermometers, if you can think of a device that can benefit from an internet connection, it probably already exists. It’s not really a surprise. The IoT market is on the brink of explosion, as Intel projects 200 billion IoT devices will be added to our networks by 2020, up from 15 billion in 2015. And they’re not all for personal use.

The Internet of Things has transformed people’s lives, enabling everything from “smart homes” to remote health monitoring. And now a startup called AMMP Technologies is using IoT – and Grafana – to help bring electricity to rural Africa. Hendrik Broering, COO and cofounder of AMMP, told the audience at GrafanaCon L.A. about a village in Tanzania called Changombe, with a population of about 2,000 and no access to electricity until 2017.

Business innovators are embracing the Internet of Things (IoT) to reinvent and enhance the customer experience, improve operational efficiency, and develop new business models. But the IoT brings a host of new IT challenges.

As mobile and IoT deployments play an increasing role in enterprise networks, organizations are looking to more appropriate architecture—such as edge computing—to relieve their security and device management burdens. Edge computing is still in its relative infancy, and the platforms and services needed to orchestrate edge deployments are evolving themselves. In this article, we’ll be looking at some of the issues and available options.

The Internet of Things offers tangible benefits, but businesses lack diagnostic tools that provide real-time visibility into IoT performance problems.