It’s a question the Auvik support team receives often: “What’s the difference between packet errors, packet discards, and packet loss?” And if you’ve ever typed that sentence—or any other variation—into Google, you’ll know it’s a tricky answer to find. Until now. Before we break down the three packet terms, let’s first look at packets themselves.

Bank in Texas enhances their Office 365 service by advanced, real end-to-end user experience monitoring.

Performance is one of those things that most people will agree is super important, but nevertheless tends to get overlooked. In light of that, I wanted to share the approach we recently took with auditing the Grafana product’s performance, and how we went about trying to improve it.

Have you ever wanted to detect a monitoring condition on an agent (Lets call it ProdWebser-01) and follow up the condition with a custom to either remediate the issue or get additional data for the alert? Great Idea, leveraging the agent is one of the best strengths of SCOM.

We are often asked this question – we are monitoring our systems and able to keep their uptime high. Isn’t that enough? Unfortunately that only provides one side of the story. Yes, they are up and resource utilization on them may be well within the limits. But it doesn’t tell us In fact, low resource utilization is very misleading because low utilization also happens when things are stuck waiting on external services response and nothing is processing.

I fly a lot. Mercifully, not as much as your typical road warrior type, but enough where I’ve developed a routine on travel days. If it’s a good weather day, then I’ll hear the pilot announce, “We’ll be cruising at 33,000 ft. and expect clear skies all the way to our destination.” And if there’s lots of clouds? There’s auto-pilot, air traffic control and radar available to do some of the heavy lifting. That got me to thinking.

For a monitoring service, uptime and reliability is of course a critical feature: customers are placing trust in the service to detect problems and deliver timely and accurate alerts. While I cannot guarantee that Healthchecks.io will absolutely never let you down, I can offer transparency on how it is currently being hosted and operated.

As you well know, many organisations are now moving to Office 365 in either a hybrid environment (Exchange on premise with Office 365 integration) or full cloud capacity. Yet, Microsoft still remains unable to provide much detail on how issues or outages impact your resources specifically – it's just not enough to know that globally "Some users or tenants may be affected". Your business needs to know if users are suffering and what proportion are impacted.