With millions of downloads for its various components since first being introduced, the ELK Stack is the world’s most popular log management platform. In contrast, Splunk — the historical leader in the space — self-reports 15,000 customers total. But what exactly is ELK, and why is the software stack seeing such widespread interest and adoption? Let’s take a deeper dive.

Kibana 6.3 was released a few weeks ago, together with new versions of Elasticsearch, Logstash and Beats, and despite the fact that this was not a major release, the new capabilities included in this version definitely deserve a close look.

ServiceDesk Plus users can now use an AD management plug-in to create and manage Active Directory (AD) users from the ServiceDesk Plus console. This plug-in will automatically add all AD user management actions to this help desk tool’s service catalog. Beyond technicians logging into ServiceDesk Plus to execute requests, regular users can access the tool to raise requests for user management actions.

RapidSpike the web and real user application monitoring, analytics and security solution based in Leeds have appointed Gav Winter as their new Chief Executive Officer.

HTTP(S) checks are the most basic checks available on the Uptime platform, but they are by no means simplistic. Adding additional parameters provides important and useful statistics. Your basic HTTP(S) Check monitors a specific web or IP address, with optional parameters that provide additional functionality. It will likely be the first check you create, but the functionality of an HTTP(S) check allows for a variety of valuable escalation scenarios.

Information technology (IT) administrators overwhelmed with the task of maintaining physical infrastructure as their networks expand into cloud and hybrid-cloud systems can now have an enhanced view of their entire IT infrastructure with GroundWork Monitor, a unified monitoring platform by GroundWork Open Source, Inc.

One month after launch Sentry 9 may feel as though it descended from heaven, but it didn’t simply fall out of the sky. It’s a release that was long in the making, touched by virtually every member of our application engineering team. We made 1979 commits to our getsentry/sentry repo alone, with 2698 files changed, 458546 insertions, and 166290 deletions.

Terraform is an open source orchestration tool for provisioning, managing, and versioning cloud infrastructure. Terraform uses a configuration file as a blueprint of the desired infrastructure state, and changes the target environment by updating or creating resources to match the defined state. Having a defined outline of your datacenter and following this “infrastructure as code” model allows for repeatable automation.