A recent study from Mulesoft shows that 75% of enterprises have moved past the digital transformation planning stage to rolling up their sleeves and diving into implementation. Teams are updating their IT Operations Management (ITOM) strategies, moving more systems and services to the cloud, and automating tedious manual processes that have historically been the root cause of migraines for many people.

Terraform is an open source orchestration tool for provisioning, managing, and versioning cloud infrastructure. Terraform uses a configuration file as a blueprint of the desired infrastructure state, and changes the target environment by updating or creating resources to match the defined state. Having a defined outline of your datacenter and following this “infrastructure as code” model allows for repeatable automation.

LogicMonitor’s LM Cloud now offers support for monitoring Azure cloud spend (in addition to detailed AWS cloud spend). We’ve made it easier than ever to monitor cloud costs and control them. LM Cloud utilizes Azure’s Rate Card and Usage APIs to calculate Azure billing data and break it down in a meaningful way. By default, cost is monitored per subscription, per region, per service, and per operation, with the ability to enable monitoring per tag as well.

The 2018 Olympic games have proven to be exciting, featuring ground-breaking athletic feats, new world records, and unprecedented diplomacy (two countries that are normally mortal enemies playing under the same flag!). The 2018 games are coming to a close, but it's not too late to get in on the action. We created a one stop shop dashboard for Olympic data (using LogicMonitor, of course).

At any given time, most cities have an ongoing infrastructure project that seems to take longer than necessary. Snarled traffic, endless lines of cars, and the ever present orange barrel. A sign has started appearing in those situations. It says "Rome wasn't built in a day. If it was, we would have hired those engineers." It’s clever way to remind people that progress requires patience. Similarly, great service provider businesses aren’t built overnight.

When a critical security flaw affecting hardware is identified -- such as the recently publicized chip vulnerabilities (Meltdown, Spectre) -- your cloud provider takes steps to implement the necessary patch(es) to protect its infrastructure. Updates performed by your cloud provider may require scheduled reboots for your cloud resources. For example, the security patch for Intel processors requires a machine reboot since the patch includes an update to the hypervisor kernel.

AWS Direct Connect provides a dedicated network connection between on-premises and AWS environments. Such a connection can be more reliable and increase the uptime of your services because you’re unlikely to be impacted by an ISP’s availability issues, as is the case with traditional, internet-based connections. With our most recent release, Direct Connect connections can be automatically discovered and monitored in LogicMonitor.