As your business grows, so will the number of people accessing your network and confidential data. The fast growth of new devices connected to your system can cause problems and outages. This is where network visibility can be a lifesaver. Having complete control over your entire online system can help you eliminate blind spots, performance…

I need to learn this. I get that feeling from time to time. Maybe you have experienced it too. For me, it happens when I know there is a better way to do things and I feel there isn’t enough time to stop and learn. It actually happened a few weeks ago. We have a large…

The quality of the customer service your company provides cannot only make or break your reputation; it can have a significant impact your bottom line. According to the [24]7, Inc. 2016 Customer Engagement Report, almost half (47%) of customers would take their business to a competitor within a day of experiencing poor customer service, and…

The Domain Name System (DNS) vies with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for the title of “Achilles heel of the internet.” If you want to take down large swathes of the internet in a single event, DNS and/or BGP are how you’d go about it. Over the past few decades, there have been innumerable security…

Test Driven Development (TDD) is not only a discipline we like to write about, we practice it ourselves every day. This is a blog post we shared with our friends over at Rainforest QA. Because we know you can’t enough of a good thing, we’re re-posting it here. Enjoy! Librato is a prolific engineering shop….

Why You Need Server Monitoring Monitoring plays a crucial role in any IT environment. It notifies you when things go wrong and provides a general idea of the health and capacity of your infrastructure. But monitoring can also play a more proactive role. If done correctly, monitoring can find the root cause of an issue…

DNS is a fundamentally insecure protocol, and DNS hijacking is becoming a common weapon in attackers’ arsenals. To mitigate this problem, the U.S. government’s DotGov domain registrar (responsible for providing .gov domains to local, municipal, and state government entities) has a new policy regarding changes to domain records. It’s simple: DotGov will send automatically generated…

Chances are good that you’ve encountered the “build versus buy” dilemma at some point in your professional career. With the increased popularity of hosted IT and developer-facing SaaS, the decision to outsource IT functions or build and maintain them in-house is more complicated than ever. Unfortunately, many decision makers still allow their decisions to be…

Python applications have proven to be top notch when dealing with complex scientific or numeric problems. As Python applications become more dynamic and complex, there’s a need to monitor performance for better troubleshooting. Developers would want to monitor Python performance for several reasons. For instance, you’d want to be the first to notice any likelihood…

  <Syslog_output> <server> 192.168.1.1</server> </syslog_output> Many people are familiar with the above commands, which are used for forwarding syslog to the syslog server (192.168.1.1). However, do you know how syslog can be helpful? Read on to find out how and see some different use cases for enabling syslog in your infrastructure. The primary use of…

Amazon CloudWatch is a popular option for collecting system and performance metrics from your AWS resources.  For some services, it’s the only means available to collect badly needed metrics data. CloudWatch makes it trivially easy to fetch core system metrics like CPU, Network, and Disk, as well as more specialized metrics like queue-sizes and latency…

Have you ever needed to quickly set up a web server? Or have you been required to distribute a load among many nodes? In these situations, the solution is often NGINX. NGINX can perform both functions, as it’s a web server but can also work as a load balancer, an HTTP cache, or even an…

Django is a web framework used in a wide variety of websites. It just takes a quick web search to discover which large companies use it as a production platform. And the reason for this is simple—it lets developers quickly deploy a website. Some of Django’s features include security and scalability right out of the…

Since the release of SQL Server® 2017 on Linux®, DBAs have been waiting for a native release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) on Linux. At this point, Microsoft has stated that they have no plans for a native Linux version of SSMS. However, they have just released a preview version of SQL Operations Studio,…

Database replication is an essential aspect of modern business that helps ensure data availability, consistency, and protection. As databases continue to grow and become more complex, it’s crucial to have an efficient way of managing and monitoring your replication software. In this post, we’ll dive into what database replication software is and why it’s vital…

Virtualization is supposed to provide consolidation and high availability benefits for applications. So what is a hypervisor? Why are there two types of hypervisors? What’s the difference between VMware® vSphere™ and Microsoft® Hyper-V®? What exactly are Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors? What if I just want to learn about vSphere and Hyper-V so that I can compare…

Finding a remote desktop Android application suitable for your needs can be a real challenge. This guide will help you choose the best RDP app for Android for your company, looking at both paid and free options. In reviewing these remote desktop support apps, we have focused on apps with RDP Android to Windows capabilities,…

Imagine for a moment that you have suddenly been promoted from regular old developer to senior architect, and tasked with overseeing the telemetry efforts for all of the engineering teams at your organization. I recently had a conversation at DevOps Days Toronto with someone who was living through exactly that experience. He’d just been put in…

Docker Basics Using Docker containers is one of the most popular ways to build modern software these days. This is due to the way containers work—they’re really fast. Containers usually start in a few seconds and deploying newer versions of a container doesn’t take much longer. But if you’re looking for maximum performance, where every…

The IT infrastructure and applications in large enterprises require dedicated staff for their management, maintenance, and security. It’s a complex job, which can overwhelm any team with tickets and issues, and that’s why IT teams are always looking out for trustworthy ways to automate, centralize, and simplify their work. One of the typical ways to…

Comprehensive and efficient network monitoring is key to running a successful managed services provider (MSP) company. Effectively it can be the determining factor between keeping customers happy and productive at all times and finding out about performance issues too late. How can you make sure you’re choosing the best tools out there? Here’s what you…