Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Hacks that make headlines are painful for everyone involved, but with some clever preparation and web monitoring at your side you can avoid the worst of this pain. Those who have been victimized face a steep uphill battle to reclaim trust and authority. Unwitting victims, like customers and end users, suffer downtime or leaks containing personally identifiable information. If your eye is not on security, your organization is inviting these kinds of attacks.

In 2014, the Mazia (Matsch) research site in the Italian Alps was officially accepted as a Long Term Socio Ecological Research LT(S)ER site. The monitoring infrastructure is operated by Eurac Research and the University of Bolzano and consists of 24 automatic microclimatic stations in a mountain ecosystem across an elevation gradient ranging from 1,000 m to 2,700 m, logging several meteorological and biophysical variables every 15 minutes.

At the shadow of the widespread IP addresses, MAC addresses say even more about our devices than its more popular sister. As a kind of “identity document for network devices”, a MAC address informs us about “who is who” when connecting to a network. Of course, remember that the one called “MAC” has nothing to do with Macintosh computers. In fact, you can find it on devices of any brand.

We all know that debugging serverless is time-consuming and hard and that AWS Console doesn’t make it much easier. CloudWatch isn’t quite known for its ease of use. Why? Well to start with, it has suboptimal search features, logs scattered across multiple buckets and groups, little visualization capability, and no structure of Lambda function invocations.

When a business application slows down, bad things happen. Your customer support gets slammed with service requests. Your boss calls an emergency meeting to talk to the product and developer teams. Everybody’s asking the same question: what happened? Diagnosing a slow application and finding the cause of the problem is something developers need to do quickly. Performance-related problems are in the top five SaaS user churn, which is a major preventable loss of revenue.

One of the keys to CloudWatch’s success is its no bang, no buck billing system. The pricing structure has been designed from the outset to ensure that CloudWatch users only pay for what they actually use. In addition, the CloudWatch Free Tier allows first time users to test the waters without shelling out. The downside of this flexibility and adaptability is complexity.

Prometheus metrics are an essential part of your observability stack. Observability comes hand in hand with monitoring, and is covered extensively here in this Essential Observability Techniques article. A well-monitored application with flexible logging frameworks can pay enormous dividends over a long period of sustained growth, but Prometheus has a problem when it comes to scale.

Happy New Year! We want to kick off 2021 by announcing some improvements to DNS Check.

Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is an Internet Standard protocol for collecting and organizing information about managed devices on IP networks and for modifying that information to change device behavior. SNMP exposes management data in the form of variables on the managed systems organized in a management information base (MIB), which describe the system status and configuration.

How do you define your workday? You walk into your office, grab a coffee, turn on your laptop and take a look at your central source of information – often dashboards – to glance at things happening overall, tasks assigned to you and sketch your schedule accordingly. A lot of our customers we talk to share a routine like this, and SquaredUp dashboards are often their one-stop-shop for consuming alerts/tasks that need their attention.