Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The evolution of machine data and logging in general has shifted multiple times over the last couple of decades. The log began with Unix and was rooted in command line actions like tail or grep. It evolved from system-based logs to application-based logs and eventually became more UI-friendly and readable. Not only has the log itself evolved, but the purpose of the log and audience for the log has morphed over time as well.

Persistent storage is one of the more difficult aspects of managing distributed systems. When we attach a storage device to a host—whether it’s flash storage, network attached storage (NAS), or old fashioned spinning disks—we generally don’t give it much thought until we start running distributed applications or need to increase capacity. But there’s more that can go wrong with storage, and this can have unexpected consequences for our systems, services, and applications.

SquaredUp 5.3 is now available! You will find new features to discover as well as enhancements to the SquaredUp you already love. Here are the highlights: Check out our release webinar for a detailed walkthrough and demo.

We are excited to announce a new community initiative – Dashboard Fridays. Dashboard Fridays is a bite-sized video series where we share and discuss a range of different dashboards created for the community, by the community. Each video is no longer than 20min, so grab a coffee and let’s talk dashboards! Each episode, we will zoom in on one stellar dashboard put together by a member of the community.

CMSIS-Packs are a package format defined by ARM for vendors to provide various software artifacts that simplify dealing with target devices. In this article, we’ll take a look at what CMSIS-Packs are, and how they can be useful!

For decades, the development and operations teams within companies were siloed. Developers created the software. Operations tested and deployed it. But in 2009, IT consultant Patrick Debois coined the term “DevOps,” a merging of development and operations to improve communications, establish best practices and create feedback loops for organizations to keep improving the overall process.

This thread came in a weird way as a result of seeing yet another re-run of the classic movie “Back to the Future” the other day. Bear with me on this one, and hopefully it will start to make some sense.

While DevOps automation aims to eliminate most human intervention in the CI/CD DevOps pipeline, you can’t always cut people completely out of the process. There are still times when you’ll want an expert, hands-on review to assure that everything is as it should be before allowing your pipeline to proceed further.

Like a football or soccer team, security also has two lineups that must be continuously managed. One lineup involves protecting the digital assets and data of a business. The other: managing the security risk and vulnerability exposure of these environments and endpoints. The tension between these two lineups keep security and IT very busy. There is a critical shortage of expert security professionals, which means no expanding the bench of talent, even if you can afford it.

On October 4, Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, suffered a global outage of its services that lasted approximately six hours. The massive outage has been blamed on configuration errors in backbone routers that are used to connect network traffic to the company’s data center. Facebook apologized to its 3.5 billion users who were unable to access any of the company’s services during the downtime.