Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Investments in advanced technology and superior assets are made for a reason, that being, better products and service delivery, all to retain their market position in times of digital transformation. However, getting a solid ROI will prove that the investments were worth including in your budget. Getting the expected returns will mean that each asset demonstrates its worth, achievable only through optimizing asset usage. And the first step towards managing your assets is accurate inventory.

Synthetic monitoring is a useful tool that ensures your site is both UP and performs well, and configuration matters. Optimized synthetic monitoring looks for necessary elements along a focused goal pathway. A poorly configured check can add precious seconds to a Transaction and trigger unwanted Global Timeout errors. Today, we’re going to do a deep dive on tips and tricks used by Uptime.com Support and Development teams to improve and optimize the Transaction checks we use everyday.

Aiven for Apache Kafka® Aiven now supports the newly released Apache Kafka version 3.2, which comes with a number of enhancements. Read on to find out what it means for you.

Inventory is an important part of asset management. In order to perform maintenance efficiently, it is crucial to have inventory available. Otherwise, not only the time of the maintenance team will be wasted, but they will also have to repeat the process again. However, there are consumables that are the hardest to keep track of, because they are small and frequently used. These consumables are nuts, bolts, helmets, gloves, etc.

StatusGator now supports Two-Factor Authentication, often called 2FA, a more secure way of signing into your account. Using an authenticator app such Google Authenticator, Authy, or a password manager like 1Password, you can now protect your StatusGator account with a second authentication factor, a one-time password (OTP) that you enter after signing in.

Today’s modern cloud architectures centered on AWS are typically a composite of ~250 AWS services and workflows implemented by over 25,000 SaaS services, house-developed services, and legacy systems. When incidents fire off in these environments—whether or not a company has built out a centralized cloud platform—distinct expertise is often a necessity.

Joins are a common transformation in any query language, and as part of the effort to make Flux an increasingly valuable tool for our users, the engineers on InfluxData’s query team created, and continue to maintain, two separate join functions. And while these solutions have met some of our users’ needs, they both lack one key feature: support for outer joins.

As a long-time database consultant, I’ve fixed more blocking problems in database systems than I can count. Often this blocking has resulted from conflicts between processes needing to read rows while those rows are being modified.

The world of IT has gone through a significant amount of change in the last five to 10 years, and the rate of digital transformation can be challenging for organizations of all sizes. Keeping up with new and evolving capabilities alongside an increasingly distributed talent pool can be tough. That’s why it has always been my goal to keep up with the latest trends and provide the best tools for professionals working in the IT trenches. One of those emerging trends is observability.

Microsoft Active Directory is one of the most popular directory services. As of November 2017, it was being used in 12.8 million organizations with 950 million users, as stated by Alex Simons, director of Program Management for the Microsoft Identity Division. Initially previewed in 1999, Active Directory (AD) became so ubiquitous that it was later a general term for other similar services.