Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In part two of our two-part series on MSP hyperspecialization, we share tips and examples of how MSPs can create their own extremely competitive niche. (Read part one on why hyperspecialization is such a high-margin opportunity.) So you get the business benefits of hyperspecializing your MSP to serve a particular business niche, and you understand the five criteria of niche expertise you need to do so. Awesome! You’re ready to jump aboard a high-margin opportunity. But… now what?

Let’s begin with a little thought experiment. Imagine you’re responsible for the next release of your company’s flagship product, and today is the big day: you’re about to give a demo presentation for all the big shots in the company. The CTO is obviously there, since she’s your boss. The CEO is there as well, along with the VP of Marketing and some of the company’s investors. So, that’s your boss, your boss’s boss, and the moneymakers.

Even the most complicated technologies should be user-friendly.

We recently implemented a Spark streaming application, which consumes data from from multiple Kafka topics. The data consumed from Kafka comprises different types of telemetry events generated by mobile devices. We decided to host the Spark cluster using the Amazon EMR service, which manages a fleet of EC2 instances to run our data-processing pipelines.

We’re in OSMC mode in October which typically means that expectations are high, time is limited and everyone is busy preparing talks, demos, implementing new features … but also fixing things. Icinga 2.10 brings support for namespaces, improved TLS connection performance and much more. Community members tackled some bugs already, 2.10.1 is released and 2.10.2 is waiting for test feedback from the snapshot packages.

It’s been a while since the last Vagrant box update and release, so here are the highlights of the past months combined into a new shiny 2.0 release :)

While the term ‘Java troubleshooting’ can apply to many, many scenarios, this post focuses on three particular long-standing Java production scenarios: a denial of service to a Java service endpoint, a memory leak, and troubleshooting a thread deadlock or race condition. Follow along as we use Java inside Docker containers to facilitate quick testing and show you how to use open source sysdig to quickly diagnose each troubleshooting scenario.