During my career (in technology), I have dealt with many clients to whom security was one of the main areas of concern. As such, there’s always room for improvement but without a shed of a doubt, communications direction and stateful firewalls are some of the very first elements to consider. When it comes to logging and audit information, as a rule of thumb, it’s good to have a log aggregator stored outside of the scope of a cloud provider. A great log correlation out there is Splunk.

All you telecom engineers out there must have already heard of fault management, right? Well, those of you who haven’t yet heard of it and need to understand what it’s about, worry no more! I’ll help you. Let’s start by defining the term.

In the first part of this blog article, I introduced key concepts surrounding data ingestion for the industrial Internet of Things, the role and importance of metrics and self-services capabilities for shop floor personnel. So let's see how this looks in practice and how the knowledge of a process or control engineer can be turned into action.

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.

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.

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.

The other day I found myself trying to tune a Ruby on Rails app I had written as a side project. (The app lets me keep track of my favorite eateries and pubs. It’s searchable, includes multiple images, and has stored locations.) On past projects, I relied on SolarWinds® Papertrail™, path testing, a lot of trial and error, and a general feel to try to improve performance. This time I thought I would give SolarWinds AppOptics™ Dev Edition a try.

In advance of the RSA Conference 2020, we wanted to get a pulse of attendees’ perceptions on a few topics, specifically challenges facing modern SOCs (security operations centers) and the value they are getting from technologies such as analytics, automation, and their SIEM tools. To get this, we fielded a series of questions to the Twitter-verse and received nearly 17,000 votes! After going through the results, we found a few interesting things…

Splunk adds and updates features and functions to Splunk Enterprise regularly to keep pace with innovation and reduce risk. In fact, Splunk releases these updates on the Splunk Cloud platform continually. For on-prem customers, Splunk releases two levels of software updates to Splunk Enterprise. On-prem customers benefit from the continual updates to the Cloud platform because features, functions, and updates are thoroughly road-tested and hardened when they are released in a major version update.