Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Getting Started with Home Assistant Webhooks & Writing to InfluxDB

If you’re already running or are familiar with Home Assistant, you’ve likely worked with integrations, maybe a few automations, and possibly MQTT as a way to wire devices together. But webhooks add another layer of flexibility that lets you level up your smart home into a fully-customized, intelligent network. Instead of relying on built-in integrations and being confined to the same local network, you can let external devices and services push events directly into Home Assistant.

How Financial Institutions Are Rethinking Risk Management in a Digital-First World

Financial services have undergone a rapid digital transformation over the past decade. Nowadays, institutions are able to scale up faster and service customers more efficiently through cloud infrastructure, real-time payments, and API-driven platforms. But this shift also introduced a more complex risk landscape. Risk management is no longer confined to compliance teams and periodic audits. It's now embedded in day-to-day operations. As financial institutions modernize, they need to rethink how they identify, monitor, and mitigate risks across their entire tech stack.

Advanced Tracking Systems For Modern Hunters

Hunters find new ways to navigate the woods with high-tech gear. Staying on the right path is much easier when you have mapping tools in your pocket. These systems help you track movement in any weather condition. Modern hardware keeps you safe and helps you find the best spots for your next trip. These devices offer better precision than the old paper maps many used in the past. You can see your exact location with the push of a button.

Operational Safety: Minimizing Premises Liability Risks

Managing a physical business space requires a constant focus on safety and risk reduction. When customers or vendors enter a property, the owner has a legal duty to keep the premises reasonably safe. Failing to meet this standard can lead to costly lawsuits and damage to a brand's reputation. Smart business owners look at safety as a core part of their daily operations rather than a side task.

Improved Microsoft 365 private status integration

Keeping track of your Microsoft 365 services just got easier. We’ve rolled out an update to the Microsoft 365 integration that removes manual setup and improves visibility. All services in your account can now automatically appear as components, so you can monitor them right away.

Reports just got smarter

We’ve upgraded the Reports page in StatusGator to give you more insight directly inside the StatusGator dashboard. Previously, reporting was limited to exports you could use to calculate your own uptime percentages and trends. Now, in addition to exported reports, you can view key reports and metrics without needing to download anything. We’ve also added a one-click download of the most commonly requested report: Uptime percentage by monitor.

Isolate a User Session in Datadog Synthetics with proxymock

A customer pings support: “I tried to check out twice this morning and got a 500 each time, but it works fine for everyone else.” The session ID is in the email. You have full request/response capture in your environment, you have Datadog Synthetics already running browser checks against the same flow, and you still spend the next two hours grepping logs because none of those tools let you say “show me just this user’s requests, in order, and re-run them.”

Ticket Taker to Team Leader: Managing an Agentic IT Workforce

The promise of AI in IT service management has been circulating for years. Chatbots that deflect tickets. Virtual agents that answer FAQs. Automation that routes requests. These are useful, but probably not the dream-state you were originally sold. What's different today is the arrival of agentic AI: systems that don't just respond to instructions but reason, act, and adapt across multi-step workflows with real consequences. The question for IT leaders is no longer whether to adopt agentic ITSM.

What happens when you delete everything? Three minutes, or thirty hours.

Last year, at the annual conference for an open source framework you've definitely heard of, I walked up to the founder in a room outside the main stage. He was hunched over his laptop, frantic. We've known each other for a few years. "What's going on? Is everything okay?" He looked up with the specific shade of white people only get when they realize they've made a big mistake.

Context Engineering: How to Manage AI Context at Scale

Context engineering is the practice of managing the information an AI model sees (documents, tool outputs, memory, and structured metadata about the systems it reasons over) so it can make accurate decisions inside a real engineering organization. Most engineering teams have access to the same AI coding agents: Claude, GPT, Gemini, the major variants everyone is shipping. The model is no longer the differentiator.