Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Being a system administrator is a high-level and demanding profession. Yes, we’re talking long hours (not counting overtime!), unforeseen events requiring attention, and so much troubleshooting. But not everything about SysAdmin life has to be more challenging than it needs to be. That’s why we put together this list of must-have SysAdmin tools so you can optimize your workflow and focus on critical tasks.

With the Grafana 8.5 release, we introduced the concept of service accounts. Now with the Grafana 9.1 release, we’re making service accounts generally available. This is a project that came out of technical necessity, but it has given us the opportunity to reflect on API tokens and machine-to-machine interaction across Grafana Labs.

For its 25th year, Black Hat USA presented a “unique hybrid event experience, offering the cybersecurity community a choice in how they wish to participate” virtually or in person. It was a jam-packed four days of trainings, conferences, briefings, special events, and cybersecurity solutions.

As business systems grow to encompass more locations, tools, and organizations, defining processes that keep pace with these changes can’t be left to a hodgepodge of disconnected programs—or worse, manual implementation of paper documentation. You need to automate. Automation within businesses first arose in the 1960s, alongside resource planning systems.

Telegraf is a very powerful open source plugin-based agent that gathers data from stacks, sensors, and systems and sends it to a database. It collects data from an input and sends it to an output, and gives you the option to transform data with aggregators and processors before it reaches its endpoint.

SLOs—or Service Level Objectives—can be pretty powerful. They provide a safety net that helps teams identify and fix issues before they reach unacceptable levels and degrade the user experience. But SLOs can also be intimidating. Here’s how a lot of teams feel about them: We know we want SLOs, we’re not sure how to really use them, and we don’t know how to debug SLO-based alerts. Don’t worry, we’ve got your answer—observability!

The first keynote speaker for GitKon 2022, a virtual tech conference for the global Git community, has been announced: Dries Buytaert, Co-founder/CTO of Acquia and founder of Drupal. His session: From the dorm room to The White House – How Drupal grew and became the standard for open source web experiences will tell the story of how Dries was able to achieve commercial success ultimately by embracing open source.

On a fairly regular basis, users will post to Reddit or Spiceworks or another IT forum to ask about the best support staff ratio of techs to users, and what other companies are finding sustainable. The question usually comes from an overworked tech who’s drowning in tickets and trying to understand what’s considered. The answers can get interesting. On Spiceworks, many people responded with details about the environments they support—and the range was notable.

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, an MSP SOP that outlines technical procedures is a well-known path to increasing efficiency in your business. Whether you’ve got existing MSP 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.