Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For the sake of security, performance and uptime, IT pros must find problems on the network immediately and fix them fast. Hmm. Sound like network detection and response (NDR)? It is.

It is safe to say that anyone responsible for patch management will have had their fair share of issues with Windows Feature Updates over the years. These updates have amounted to new operating systems versions being released up to twice a year, and needless to say, could be huge in size—ranging anywhere from 3GB to 6GB. This resulted in not only long download times, but also lengthy install times—anywhere from one to two hours—that required multiple reboots to complete.

I’ve always been wary about vendor events. In my experience, many of them are mostly marketing pitches, with little or no content that is applicable to my use cases. Despite that, last year I decided to convince my manager to let me attend ObservabilityCON 2022 to see what I could learn from it. My hope was that I would be able to get practical knowledge that could be applied as soon as I got back to work. (Spoiler alert: I did!)

Flaky tests are a problem that are found in almost every codebase. By definition, a flaky test is a test that both succeeds and fails without any changes to the code. For example, a flaky test may pass when someone runs it locally, but then fails on continuous integration (CI). Another example is that a flaky test may pass on CI, but when someone pushes a commit that hasn’t touched anything related to the flaky test, the test then fails.

Everyone loves a good mystery thriller. Ok, not everyone – but Hollywood certainly does. Whether it’s Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, audiences clearly enjoy a page-turning plot of hunting down the culprit for some heinous crime.

Have you ever patched your servers using scripts only to realize that you missed another script for pre-update configuration compliance that had to run beforehand? Most IT organizations start with scripting simple, repetitive tasks in either Python, PowerShell, or Perl to help provide the quickest ROI. Common pain points solved for are creating user accounts, installing patches, software, and provisioning resources such as virtual machines (VMs), etc.

In December 2022, the latest version of HAProxy, 2.7.0, was released. This open-source software is both a proxy and a load balancer, and is immensely popular due to the sheer volume of features it provides to help reduce or even avoid downtime and manage web traffic. Website or application downtime is disastrous for businesses. You want to serve as many users as possible, but if you have nothing in place to manage traffic, then your web applications can quickly become overwhelmed and fail.