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Monitoring

The latest News and Information on Monitoring for Websites, Applications, APIs, Infrastructure, and other technologies.

Best Practices for Instrumenting Containers with AppDynamics Agents

In this blog I will show some best practices for instrumenting Docker containers, using docker-compose with a few popular AppDynamics application agent types. The goal here is to avoid rebuilding your application containers in the event of an agent upgrade, or having to hard-code AppDynamics configuration into your container images. In my role as a DevOps engineer working on AppDynamics’ production environments, I use these techniques to simplify our instrumented container deployments.

MSP Hyperspecialization: A High Margin Opportunity

It seems like every year, there’s a trendy new business model that managed services providers (MSPs) are told to adopt if you want to, well, survive. The most obvious example in 2018 is security. Cybercrime is a hot topic at channel conferences, and vendors are offering content in droves to help MSPs package and sell managed security services with the promise it’ll help you better protect your customers—and your business.

Alert fatigue, part 4: alert consolidation

So far, we’ve covered alert reduction with Sensu filters and token substitution; automating triage; and remediation with check hooks and handlers (links above). In this post, I’ll cover alert consolidation via round robin subscriptions and JIT/proxy clients; aggregates; and check dependencies. These are all designed to help you cut through the “white noise” and focus on what’s important (especially in the middle of a major incident).

3 Reasons Why Website Speed is More Important than Ever

Today’s business environment is relentlessly fast-paced. Today’s startups blast into tomorrow’s enterprises. And just as rapidly, today’s unicorns take a one-way journey into “hey, whatever happened to…” country. However, there’s another critical piece of the velocity puzzle that many businesses are missing, and it’s costing them customers and profits: the speed of their website.

PgBouncer monitoring improvements in recent versions

As I wrote in my previous article “USE, RED and real world PgBouncer monitoring” there are some nice commands in PgBouncer’s admin interface that allow to collect stats how things going and spot problems, if you know where to look. This post is about new stats added in these commands in new PgBouncer versions.

How to migrate SNMP monitoring from Cacti to Pandora FMS

Any IT environment needs a monitoring system, but which one should we use? We can opt for traditional and more limited systems, or for current monitoring systems such as Pandora FMS. In order to facilitate the task to any user that needs it, from the Pandora FMS team we have developed a method to migrate SNMP monitoring data in order to learn how to migrate Cacti to Pandora FMS in a fast and easy way.

Monitor Password Protected Websites for Changes

Many of our users come to ChangeTower in search of a website monitoring solution for their password-protected websites. While your browser inherently recognizes you when browsing your sites, website monitoring services are essentially going to be monitoring your webpages in ‘incognito’ mode and often times need to get past a login screen in order to get to the content you’d like to check for changes.