Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Two-factor authentication (TFA, sometimes 2FA) is a crucial security measure that adds an extra layer of protection to your online account. It goes beyond the traditional password-based authentication by requiring a second form of verification. In TFA-backed applications, users are supposed to provide two forms of verification before gaining access to their accounts.

This is a guest post authored by Nathan Skrzypczak, R&D Engineer at Cisco. Calico VPP, the latest addition to Calico’s suite of pluggable data planes, revolutionizes Kubernetes networking by enabling transparent user-space packet processing. With features such as service load balancing, encapsulation, policy enforcement, and encryption, Calico VPP brings the performance, flexibility, and observability of VPP to Kubernetes networking.

In today’s data-driven landscape, every organization knows the immense value their data holds, but with the explosion of data from diverse sources, traditional data storage and management solutions are proving inadequate. Organizations are urgently seeking new ways to handle their data effectively.

Containerized microservices have been the gold standard for cloud computing since they replaced the monolith architecture over a decade ago. The flexibility, scalability, and velocity they enable for teams make them an obvious choice. Yet, a strict interpretation of one service for one function doesn’t quite serve everyone, especially when architectures get large. We’ll discuss how flexibility in service architecture might be the way to go.

Goutham Veeramachaneni, a product manager at Grafana Labs, and Carrie Edwards, a senior software engineer at Grafana Labs, are both contributors to the Prometheus open source project. This post, which they wrote together, was originally published on the Prometheus.io blog in March 2024. The OpenTelemetry project is an observability framework and toolkit designed to create and manage telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs.

Observability is the process of understanding complex systems by analyzing their outcomes and enhancing those outcomes by monitoring events within the system. Today, observability is essential for IT services to achieve a better user experience and optimize software performance. With cloud platforms dominating the IT services landscape, organizations are inclined to deploy their software and hardware systems in the cloud to reduce operational costs and enhance flexibility.

To increase business agility, IT organizations are deploying dynamic, modern architectures enabled by virtualization technologies. That includes containers, elastic clouds, microservices, and virtual machines. If you are rethinking your IT stack, you must also reconsider its management. IT operational silos limit business velocity.

We are very excited to announce that we redesigned our monitoring results chart to make it easier for you to understand check performance over time and easily investigate any past anomaly. The redesign is a result of our UX research that showed that the old check overview chart made it challenging for users to find check results from the past. While we were redesigning our monitoring results charts, we wanted to achieve two things: And, we achieved this in three attempts. Let’s dive in.

While the Biden administration aggressively pushes federal agencies to modernize their IT infrastructures, ITOps managers are left wondering how to do so without making network management more complex than it already is. Modernization necessitates the addition of more tools, which can easily lead to tool sprawl and increase technical debt. Managers are already using multitudes of vendor-specific tools to monitor different devices and applications. The last thing they want is to add more.

In the digital age, efficient document management is more than a convenience—it’s a necessity. SharePoint, a product of Microsoft, stands out as a premier tool for organizing, storing, and retrieving documents. But the real game-changer within SharePoint is the feature known as “Document Sets.” Document Sets in SharePoint serve as a method to group related documents together, allowing them to be managed as a single unit.