In this edition of News That Makes the Channel Cringe, a new Sophos report reveals IT pros can’t identify almost half (45%) of the traffic flowing through their networks. The Dirty Secrets of Network Firewalls study, which included the responses of 2,700 mid-size business IT leaders, goes on to say 25% can’t identify over 70% of total network traffic. That’s a massive blind spot, especially with mounting concerns over cybersecurity. The network is what keeps your clients connected.

Web security for online businesses is an area not very well understood by many. Influx of content managing systems has led to a lot of online presence that is basically confused on how online security works. Some of the people who use these CMS do not know what web security is and how to implement it.

What the Beats family of log shippers are to Logstash, so Fluent Bit is to Fluentd — a lightweight log collector, that can be installed as an agent on edge servers in a logging architecture, shipping to a selection of output destinations.

Elasticsearch comes with good out-of-the-box Garbage Collection settings. So good in fact that the Definitive Guide recommends not changing them. While we agree that most use-cases wouldn’t benefit from GC tuning, especially when it turns out there simply isn’t enough heap, there are exceptions. We found that G1 GC, for example, works well on big heaps. This allows you to have less, bigger nodes, which in turn means less network traffic in a large cluster.

Modern organizations today are managing increasingly complex technology portfolios and pressured to deliver on innovation—all while facing far higher stakes than ever before when it comes to maintaining service performance and reliability. While these demands may seem like a paradox, many organizations have been successful in implementing processes that enable them to balance both agility and risk.

LogicMonitor’s LM Cloud now offers support for monitoring Azure cloud spend (in addition to detailed AWS cloud spend). We’ve made it easier than ever to monitor cloud costs and control them. LM Cloud utilizes Azure’s Rate Card and Usage APIs to calculate Azure billing data and break it down in a meaningful way. By default, cost is monitored per subscription, per region, per service, and per operation, with the ability to enable monitoring per tag as well.

Your virtual machine shares resources with other virtual machines on a hypervisor (the server that is hosting the virtual machines). CPU Steal is the amount of time your virtual CPU has to wait for a real CPU from the hypervisor. This happens when a neighbour VM is using up all the real CPU of the hypervisor. CPU Steal is an important metric to monitor in case you're using virtualized servers. It can have significant impact on the performance of your machine.

Application performance monitoring (APM) has become one of the key strategies adopted by IT teams and application owners in today’s era of digital business services. Application downtime has always been considered adverse to business productivity. But in today’s digital economy, what is becoming equally dreadful is application slowdown.

Heard of the prebuilt integration between Icinga and AlertOps? Icinga is an open source computer system and network monitoring application that is critical for your business.