In the last decade, it has become increasingly important to secure websites and applications using HTTPS instead of HTTP. A GroundWork Monitor installation is no exception, so in GroundWork 8, using HTTPS to access the system is the default setup, and you can add TLS certificates to it that you generate or purchase. See Adding Certificates to HTTPS for more information on doing so.

In case you haven’t already seen a description, “Sunburst” is malicious code which attaches itself to legitimate libraries, installs itself as a service, then reaches out to command-and-control remote network infrastructure to prepare a second stage of attack: to move throughout the environment and compromise or exfiltrate data. Pretty nasty stuff, and we should all be concerned.

GroundWork Monitor makes it simple to monitor the health of Oracle databases, whether the need is simple monitoring of availability or for capacity planning purposes. Oracle databases may be monitored either directly on the Oracle host or from a different host, using the GroundWork Distributed Monitoring Agent (GDMA). In both scenarios, SQL queries are used to provide the data from the database.

Prometheus is a popular open-source systems monitoring and alerting project. The project is a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, joining in 2016 as the second hosted project, after Kubernetes. In this blog, we will demonstrate how to implement Application Performance Monitoring (APM) using the Prometheus GoLang client libraries API and de-facto standard data transport model to feed monitoring metrics into the GroundWork Monitor 8 server.

A monitoring system is a shared tool. It’s useful for teams to operate from the same source of information, since subjective opinions can lead insights astray, especially when troubleshooting systems and network issues. You need a single source of truth. A monitoring dashboard with drill-down capability is a basic tool for any NOC staff. Often displayed on kiosks or wall-mounted in the Network Operations Center (NOC), dashboards let you know at a glance whether anything needs attention.

GroundWork Monitor offers Parent Child configurations for distributed monitoring, enabling the monitoring of a subset of an infrastructure where Child servers report the state and performance metrics to a central, or “Parent” GroundWork server.

Container technologies have captivated the computing world. Containers are the cornerstone for cloud computing and microservice architectures. Whether it be Docker™, Docker Compose™, or Kubernetes™, the IT world is embracing this technology with great enthusiasm. How can you monitor containers? They are different from traditional hosts and servers. For one thing, they are not physical machines; nor are they virtual machines.