Tools and features introduced with the intention of benefiting and empowering an organization can sometimes end up being misused. PowerShell is a classic example.

Icinga for Windows is our framework and plugin collection to monitor Windows hosts natively with the Icinga Agent. We published our first release candidate in November, today we are delighted to announce the availability of Release Candidate 2 of Icinga for Windows. Thanks to your feedback and tests during the past weeks, we were able to improve the entire solution and increase the stability and reliability.

Hey, there. This is part four of the Elastic SIEM for home and small business blog series. If you haven’t read the first, second, and third blogs, you may want to before going any further. In the Getting started blog, we created our Elasticsearch Service deployment and started collecting data from one of our computers using Winlogbeat. In the Securing cluster access blog, we secured access to our cluster by restricting privileges for users and Beats.

Have you ever needed to grab a log from a local server that is not part of the Windows Event Channel? Applications like IIS or DNS can write their logs to a local file, and you need to get them into your centralized logging server for correlation and visualization. Graylog sidecar can help by creating and managing a centralized configuration for a filebeat agent, to gather these types of logs across all your infrastructure hosts.

During the past years we made plenty of contributions to improve the current state of the Windows monitoring. We tried to improve the actual installation with the Icinga 2 Powershell Module, allowing users to easier automate installation and configuration of Icinga 2. On a long term we however wanted to improve the monitoring of Windows infrastructures entirely, by not only providing new plugins but also to increase the contribution by the community.

With support for Windows 2008 shrinking, most enterprises are looking for options to move their apps onto newer versions of Windows (2016 or 2019). Some enterprises are okay paying through their nose for extended support, the majority cannot afford it! Some enterprises started migrating these apps ahead of time, however, some are stuck on which option to choose (re-write or re-platform).

With 900 billion devices running on Windows 10, the future is bright for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). UWP’s strength lies in its ability to adapt itself completely to the native user interface - whether that’s a computer, tablet, Xbox or IoT device. It’s a win-win; users get a consistent experience as they consume across devices, while developers get easier deployments.

Windows Support went GA for Kubernetes in version 1.14 and represented years of work. This has been the effort of excellent engineers from companies including Microsoft, Pivotal, VMWare, RedHat, and the now-defunct Apprenda, among others. I’ve been a lurker and occasional contributor to the sig-windows community going back to my days with Apprenda, and I’ve continued to follow it in my current role with Rancher Labs.

Skip ahead to see how we solve a typical Windows 10 update problem (Windows Defender) It hasn’t been the easiest of weeks for Windows 10 users and support staff. And if we’re being honest, the previous months haven’t been all sunshine and rainbows either. For many, Patch Tuesday is starting to look less like a welcomed milestone for Windows 10 updates and fixes, and more like a doomsday for new malware and computing defects.

WSUS (Windows Server Update Service) is an add-on provided by Microsoft for patching Windows applications. Along with being free, the basic functionalities that WSUS provides makes it an easy choice for major SMBs. However, in reality, WSUS falls short in a number of ways; because of this, many teams that rely on WSUS for their patching needs end up investing in additional tools that usually come at an additional cost.