Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

That’s right. You’ve nailed it. Your status page rocks. Your doing all the things right, and so your status page is awesome. Here is why:

Software monitoring allows developers and IT professionals to observe events occurring within a monitored system. The data gathered by monitoring processes offers visibility into how the monitored entity is behaving and provides warning signs indicating that some aspect of the system deserves greater attention. More and more software is migrating to the cloud, and monolithic software is being decomposed into microservices to create distributed applications.

Depending on who you ask, shadow IT, also known as stealth IT, falls somewhere on the spectrum between “persistent headache” and “total mystery.” If you ask someone on an actual IT team, they might tell you that shadow IT poses an existential threat to security and compliance. But their coworkers – the folks responsible for bringing rogue tech into the company – typically don’t even know what shadow IT is.

In a previous post we showed how to install Prometheus and Grafana using the prometheus-ksonnet library along with Tanka. This is great for getting a well-managed monitoring install going, but sometimes it isn’t enough for monitoring larger clusters. If you have multiple clusters that you want to monitor on a single dashboard, or need long-term storage, or need a high-availability setup for your monitoring data, then this installation won’t be sufficient on its own.

In the previous post, we talked about connecting data sources to your Log Analytics workspace. While the data can be super useful, it is “unstructured” at this point – not really in the right shape to perform a specific task or enable useful monitoring of an application or a service. This is where “Solutions” come into picture (formerly called management solutions). Solutions can also leverage other services in Azure to perform many related actions, such as automation.

Our suite of operations products has come a long way since the acquisition of Stackdriver back in 2014. The suite has constantly evolved with significant new capabilities since then, and today we reach another important milestone with complete integration into the Google Cloud Console. We’re now saying goodbye to the Stackdriver brand, and announcing an operations suite of products, which includes Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Trace, Cloud Debugger, and Cloud Profiler.

Today is day one of the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, where thousands of security professionals from around the world come together to share new ideas, discuss global security vulnerabilities, and explore the latest technologies in the security industry.

Have you ever experienced a time when someone on your team takes off to recharge or takes unplanned downtime away from work? It may feel a bit scary as workloads shift, priorities change and the team has to pick up some slack. We all need to recharge and in some org’s, it’s imperative. The covering for each other builds trust among the team which is invaluable when you’re in the trenches daily, working hard.

As antivirus and machine learning-based malware detection have increased their effectiveness in detecting file-based attacks, adversaries have migrated to “living off the land” techniques to bypass modern security software. This involves executing system tools preinstalled with the operating system or commonly brought in by administrators to perform tasks like automating IT administrative tasks, running scripts on a regular basis, executing code on remote systems, and much more.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” …this quote by Peter Drucker and the philosophy behind it is a key driving force behind modern management and the introduction of BI solutions to support the scaling and increased complexity of businesses. Analytics tools were developed to enable metric measurement and business monitoring across large scale, complex systems and to enable continuous improvements of business performance.