Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

System Administrators use various tools to get the job done. Among that tech stack, SysAdmin password generators are an absolute must. However, there are a lot of options to choose from, and making the right choice can often be a daunting task. Similar as we did a while ago with enterprise password managers, let’s review the favorites, and break their pros and cons down into digestible information.

Only two days into the new year, and we had our first BGP routing leak. It was followed by a couple more in subsequent days. Although these incidents were brief with marginal operational impact on the internet, they are still worth analyzing because they shed light on the cracks in the internet’s routing system.

Elastic Observability 8.6 introduces a set of capabilities improving production operations through the introduction of host (EC2/GCP compute/Azure compute) observability, application dependency operations views (insights into databases, caches, etc), and a new connector for Opsgenie. These new features allow customers to: Elastic Observability 8.6 is available now on Elastic Cloud — the only hosted Elasticsearch offering to include all of the new features in this latest release.

Elastic Enterprise Search 8.6 enables customers to index searchable content on file systems, network drives, MongoDB, and Amazon S3. With new connectors for network drives and Amazon S3, content indexed can easily be transformed for natural language processing (NLP) use cases with intuitive tooling to test and tune your search experience with the trained model of your choice.

When working with log messages, it’s critical that the timestamp of the log message is accurate. Incorrect timestamps can cause problems when trying to find log messages at a specific date/time or may cause alerts to not function properly. A common cause of incorrect timestamps for log messages is a mismatch of time zones between the log source (device sending the log) and log destination (device receiving the log, such as Graylog).

According to data from W3Techs, more than 40% of all websites are built on WordPress. Therefore, it’s no surprise that WordPress hosting has skyrocketed in popularity recently and hosting providers have proliferated. With so many choices, it’s important to understand just how reliable WordPress hosts are, especially when it comes to downtime. Web hosting downtime can have significant consequences such as business loss, brand damage, and missed opportunities.

While IT pros know they need to monitor IT services, they also know it can be the most difficult part of their job. Traditionally, enterprises have cobbled together several disparate monitoring products to address all their monitoring needs – but there are often gaps. Within these gaps, issues are missed, and the possibility of proactive issue resolution becomes nearly impossible.

I recently attended a virtual event and heard the speaker comment, “Relational databases don’t scale.” To my ears, this is about as silly a statement as saying, “No one can eat 26 hot dogs in 12 minutes” right before Kobayashi shows up and eats 50. In my experience, relational databases scale when they’re placed in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. Just imagine if Kobayashi was your data architect!