Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Hey everyone. We’re excited to announce the release of Calico v3.23! Thanks to everyone in the community who contributed to the release. We could not have fitted this many improvements in without you. To view the detailed release notes, please visit us here. While we have many improvements in this release, here’s a brief overview of some of the larger features to be aware of.

For much of the past two years, businesses have been looking ahead to an eventual return to the office – a return that has been frequently delayed and disrupted by the unpredictable nature of the COVID-19 pandemic. But with some employees resistant to returning, companies are looking for new options to entice employees back. It may not be a return to the office at all, but instead a movement towards an entirely new way of working together.

What happens when the tools and services you depend on to drive Site Reliability Engineering turn out to be susceptible to reliability failures of their own? That’s the question that teams at about 400 businesses have presumably had to ask themselves this month in the wake of a major outage in Atlassian Cloud.

At this point we are well past the third installment of the trilogy, and at the end of the second installment of trilogies. You might be wondering if the second set of trilogies was strictly necessary (we’re looking at you, Star Wars) or a great idea (well done, Lord of the Rings, nice compliment to the books). Needless to say, detecting anomalies in data remains as important to our customers as it was back at the start of 2018 when the first installment of this series was released.

It’s always something, isn’t it? It seems that just as you’ve gotten your organization up to speed with ITAM guidelines, some newfangled idea comes along to stir things up. But IT is (or should be) all about continuous improvement. Stationary things wither on the vine; things that move, evolve. ITAM 2.0 is precisely about keeping things moving along in the right direction. And, like it or not, managing your asset inventory is always going to be open to improvement.

Embracing the cloud is not just a case of improving infrastructure, experts believe, but also a way to drive transformation. Many of the world’s largest financial exchanges are transforming the way they run global capital markets through the adoption of cloud computing technologies. In November, financial derivatives exchange CME Group entered a 10-year partnership with Google that will move CME’s IT infrastructure and markets to the cloud.

Before the pandemic, assets were managed through a spreadsheet or a register and were managed manually by the Asset Manager/IT Agent (in some cases). When the pandemic forced people to work out of their homes, assets management became complex. Manual allocation of assets, monitoring software licenses and upgrades, and keeping track of assets were tedious. It became impossible to manage remote assets without using an asset management solution.

Regardless of economic conditions, IT usually operates under an axiom no one in business ever likes to hear: “We have to do more with less.” Doing more with less is essentially the default position for IT, but when it comes to security operations, that position can have real consequences.

For this edition of my ongoing Grafana Loki how-to series, I wanted to offer up some helpful — and perhaps surprising — facts about using LogQL, Loki’s query language. In case you’re new to Grafana Loki, it’s a log aggregation system created in 2018, and the Loki team has worked with the community ever since to introduce new features and make it easier to deploy.