Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Continuous security (or control) validation helps me explain network security with one of my favorite analogies. Network security is like jiu-jitsu. You have no idea how strong your defenses are if you’re not rolling (sparring) regularly. Let’s take a closer look at continuous security validation, and explain why, just like jiu-jitsu, you need to keep your system in practice to keep it sharp.

Sometimes we associate “big” with power and success, but being small doesn’t mean you can’t compete—you just need to be smarter at creating a sustainable competitive advantage. Here are 10 things you can do as a small managed service provider (MSP) to punch above your weight.

Administrators are tasked with configuring interfaces on network devices more than any other single thing. This makes sense—interfaces are the main points of connectivity, sending and receiving traffic throughout an organization. Configuring interfaces can be deceptively easy. Switchports might require a VLAN assignment, and often function with no other configuration at all. Router interfaces can be up and running with only an IP address.

InfluxDB Cloud allows users to create API tokens that are used for authentication and authorization to sets of resources when interacting with our API. We recently made changes to the user interface so that after generating a token, you will need to immediately store it in a secure vault of your choosing for safekeeping. We made this change to conform to industry best practices around both token generation and retrieval.

People may not reminisce over 2021, but as Winston Churchill once said, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” 2021 swooped in on the coattails of a major supply chain data breach, and a lot of the challenges we experienced during this past year seemed to follow suit. To celebrate the best and hopefully move away from the worst that 2021 had to offer, this look back at 2021 trends can inspire us all to learn, and most of all, show us how to move forward.

Earlier this year we launched Datadog Apps, which seamlessly integrate functionality from third-party tools into Datadog’s centralized monitoring platform. This project has enabled us to collaborate with some of our partners, such as PagerDuty and LaunchDarkly, to extend the Datadog UI and provide our customers with new solutions for incident management, feature flag optimization, and more.

Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) database offering for modern cloud applications. It’s a fully managed service that runs on the latest version of the SQL Server database engine, enabling you to create highly available and performant database instances without needing to maintain hardware upgrades, patches, or backups.

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed key metrics for monitoring Microsoft Azure SQL databases. We also looked at how your database resource and audit logs complement metrics to provide more insight into database performance, activity, and security. In this post, we’ll show you how to collect metrics and logs from your database instances and monitor them with Azure’s monitoring and reporting tools.

In Part 2 of this series, we showed you how to monitor Azure SQL Database metrics and logs using the Azure platform. In this post, we will look at how you can use Datadog to monitor your Azure SQL databases alongside other technologies in your infrastructure. Datadog provides turn-key integrations for Azure along with more than 500 other technologies, enabling you to track long-term performance trends across all systems in your infrastructure, not just your SQL databases.

Hybrid cloud environments can add complexity, reduce visibility, and require different logging and monitoring approaches for security teams. For a growing number of organizations, IT environments encompass a blend of public cloud services, private clouds, and on-premises infrastructure—with the latter becoming an ever-smaller portion of the mix. The past two years have seen a major uptick in the use of cloud services, and the trend shows no signs of slowing.