Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Unified endpoint management (UEM) is an IT best practice and strategy for securing and controlling desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, and tablets in a connected, secure manner from a single console. It’s increasingly important for enterprises today because of the prevalence of corporate-owned, personally-enabled (COPE) devices, and bring your own devices (BYOD) policies.

December was a busy month with systems we don’t normally see experiencing server downtime. Our first story, in particular, is an excellent example of how complicated monitoring can get as infrastructure grows. We saw every level get hit, from the government to big-name players, with ransomware being one of the major thorns in our collective sides. But we also bring you the heartwarming tale of the little Minecraft Server that could.

Have you ever dealt with a unicode bug? Where plain text — the substance you work with all day — can no longer be trusted? It can be disorienting to say the least! This article will help prepare you so that the next time that happens you’ll be able to spend less time hyperventilating and more time troubleshooting.

84.51°, the data analytics and marketing company owned by The Kroger Company, found out it needed centralized metrics the hard way. When Erin O’Brien was brought into the company in the spring of 2019 as a Lead Service Manager, she was tasked with evaluating and seeking ways to continuously improve how the Technology and Product teams worked together.

Serverless development opens lots of new opportunities, and if you’re invested in serverless (or you’ve been following the hype) you’ll know that cost efficiency is principal among those benefits. Simply put, we can save money by choosing the right tool for the right task. Since a distributed microservices architecture is made up of many managed services it’s a simple task to change out the building blocks of a particular application flow.

Elasticsearch and the rest of the Elastic Stack are commonly used for log and metric aggregation in various environments, including Kubernetes. In addition, the Elastic Stack is frequently being used for uptime tracking, with Heartbeat, as well as Application Performance Monitoring (APM), with agents supporting common programming languages, including Java.

This article originally appeared in TechBeacon. Gartner first coined the term "AIOps" a few years ago to describe "artificial intelligence for IT operations," and over the last few years, IT operations monitoring tool vendors have begun incorporating AIOps features into their products. Now AIOps tools are commonplace, but many IT leaders remain cautious about using these relatively new capabilities.

Standard operating procedures—more commonly known as SOPs—are written, step-by-step instructions that describe how to perform a routine activity. While you can create an SOP for anything, SOPs that outline technical procedures are a well-known path to increasing efficiency in your MSP business. Whether you’ve got existing SOPs you’re interested in updating, or you’re looking for some basic steps to build brand new SOPs around, you’ve come to the right place.

January is a good time for bug-fixing and we've spent the last couple of weeks making small tweaks and improvements to Downtime Monkey. We've focused on the kind of bugs that aren't urgent but shouldn't be overlooked and aim to continue this for a couple more weeks before starting development of the next major feature. We'll document each change in its own post. First up is an improvement to the range of webpages available for monitoring: webpages with query strings can now be monitored...