Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In December 2020, we blogged about security issues in Go’s encoding/xml with critical impact on several Go-based SAML implementations. Coordinating the disclosure around those issues was no small feat; we spent months emailing the Go security team, reviewing code, testing and retesting exploits, coming up with workarounds, implementing a validation library, and finally reaching out to SAML library maintainers and 20 different companies downstream.

A year ago, in July of 2020, I started my SysAdmin Day post  with the words, Here we are, 12 months later, and a lot has changed, but life (and tech) continue to be extraordinarily not-normal. The challenges we face as IT pros in general and SysAdmins in particular push us to our limits daily, and there’s no hiding or sugar-coating it. In the face of all this, I’d like to offer some new thoughts for my SysAdmin family to help process the year that was and navigate the challenges to come.

JFrog customers will soon enjoy end-to-end, holistic security across their software lifecycle — from development to devices — as the technology of recently-acquired Vdoo gets integrated into the JFrog DevOps Platform. That was the pledge made by JFrog and Vdoo leaders during their first joint webinar, in which they explained why JFrog acquired Vdoo, how the platform’s security and compliance capabilities will expand, and what’s the integration timeline.

It’s no secret that the past year and a half has been challenging for all departments across organizations. One unsung hero? IT. IT is quite literally responsible for keeping the lights on in a work environment that has shifted primarily online.

Cox Automotive is a global company with over 40,000 auto dealer clients across five continents. The company, which houses Kelly Blue Book, Autotrader, and 25 other brands, was built through acquisitions. Its IT Operations team is tasked with bringing them together under the Cox Automotive umbrella and ensuring “a good, consistent experience” for its customers worldwide.

Today we’re announcing the general availability of Icinga Web v2.7.6, v2.8.4 and v2.9.2. All are standard bugfix releases and include fixes found by the community since the latest releases. You can find all issues related to this release on our Roadmap. Please make sure to also check the respective upgrading section in the documentation. This release is accompanied by the minor releases v2.7.6 and v2.8.4 which include the fix for the flattened custom variables.

2020 heralded a year of increased complexity and customer demands, which isn’t going away. In this new normal, organizations will still be tasked with keeping up this break-neck pace. So, what did digital operations look like in 2020 compared to 2019?

In my previous blog post, I demonstrated how to use Prometheus and Fluentd with the Elastic Stack to monitor Kubernetes. That’s a good option if you’re already using those open source-based monitoring tools in your organization. But, if you’re new to Kubernetes monitoring, or want to take full advantage of Elastic Observability, there is an easier and more comprehensive way. In this blog, we will explore how to monitor Kubernetes the Elastic way: using Filebeat and Metricbeat.

Apache Cassandra is an open-source distributed NoSQL database management system that was released by Facebook almost 12 years ago. It’s designed to handle vast amounts of data, with high availability and no single point of failure. It is a wide-column store, meaning that it organizes related facts into columns. Columns are grouped into “column families.” The benefit is that you can manage data that just won’t fit on one computer.