Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

„Thanks for coming! Thanks for supporting us as a company, as a product, as our people! Enjoy the wonderful night!“ A shower of confetti was pouring over the heads of celebrating people just as our CEO Bernd finished his sentence. „I Gotta Feeling“ by Black Eyed Peas played. The song was released on May 21, 2009. Just shortly after Icinga was seeing the light of the world on May 6, 2009. It was the early summer of 2019. We were celebrating the 10th anniversary of Icinga.

Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, so a definition of what it is and what it does is difficult to nail down. In an age where digital acceleration is priority zero, companies are evaluating cultural shifts towards new operating models like service ownership to unlock efficiency in a complex world of hybrid cloud environments, AIOps emerges as an attractive potential investment to solve central IT aches and pains.

When we decided to build Checkly's browser checks, we chose to do so with Puppeteer, an open-source headless browser automation tool, later adding Playwright, too. We wanted to support users with synthetic monitoring and testing to let them know whether their websites worked as expected at any given moment. Speed was a primary concern in our case. Yet, determining which automation tool is generally faster is far from simple.

Recently, the JetBrains .NET advocacy team published a deep-dive post powered by data we retrieved from the official NuGet APIs with the goal of better understanding our community's OSS past and trying to predict trends into the future. This resulted in a giant dataset. Given our experience with Elasticsearch, we knew that the best tool to process millions of records was what we're calling the NECK stack: .NET, Elasticsearch, CSV, and Kibana.

Elastic Maps added several exciting features with the release of Kibana 7.10 that let you do even more with your location data. From making it easier to upload files with latitude and longitude fields to being able to trigger an alert when something moves across a boundary, there are a host of jaw droppingly cool new things to check out. I’ll be providing a good overview in this blog, but to see the real magic, I’d suggest: Now onto the good stuff!

Ease of use and outstanding user experience have always been a top priority for us, and we consider them to be a key factor in our success. Recent years have seen enterprise customers also looking for a self-service, low-friction user experience – and part of that includes access to extensive educational content, for all the stages of the product onboarding process and all levels of usage.

For decades, Microsoft SQL has been a leading relational database solution within Windows-based environments. The extension of Microsoft SQL support to Linux servers in 2017 made the platform even more popular. There’s a good chance that, no matter which types of infrastructure or servers you manage, there are Microsoft SQL databases residing somewhere on them. That’s why it’s critical to understand the fundamentals of Microsoft SQL monitoring.

Ubuntu and Launchpad use OpenPGP keys heavily. Each source package is signed with the uploader’s key, and binary and source package downloads from Ubuntu’s primary archives and from users’ Personal Package Archives (PPAs) are indirectly signed by the publisher process with per-archive keys of its own. Access to Launchpad’s bug-manipulation interface is also controlled by OpenPGP. As a result, Launchpad needs a reliable key-storage and synchronization mechanism.

As an administrator, you want to enable your users and not restrict them wherever possible. But this means you will have to keep track of your users. In the end, you are responsible if some critical alert is not properly escalated.

Server monitoring is a valuable tool when it is set up and configured correctly. With a server monitoring service, there are several things you can do if you have the right knowledge. Obtaining that knowledge is easy when you have experts in your employee or on contract. For others, access to experts is not as easy to come by.