The Network Monitor

Despite being an essential piece of the Sysadmin toolbox, Network performance management (NPM) can be a bit of a mystery for many IT professionals.

Scanning ports is very popular among cybercriminals. It’s often their first step of reconnaissance to discover services they can exploit and systems they can break into as they try to steal or destroy sensitive data. Two recent examples of major breaches illustrate just how handy port scanning is to threat actors:

WhatsUp Gold can monitor every single part of your network to give you a wealth of information on status, performance, traffic and thousands of other metrics. And now WhatsUp Gold can share that information directly with any of your systems thanks to our new REST API.

Disclaimer: Azure Monitor’s is more than 2700 pages of fascinating material. Azure Application Insights is a small part of it. Given the variety of nodes, features, apps and development methods in an Azure infrastructure, app and performance monitoring objectives can be achieved in many ways. This article focuses on Application Insights only.

It’s 2:00 a.m. in the United States: Can your employees and customers in Europe and Asia access the applications running in your Microsoft Azure cloud? If you’re not sure on a 24x7 basis what the status is of your Azure servers and applications, it’s time to invest in a third-party monitoring tool.

If you are reading this, you are likely interested in or already utilize cloud solutions. Both Azure and AWS (Amazon Web Services) offer a variety of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) offerings. Selection between the two, with AWS the dominant market leader, is typically based on business requirements and online research or direct referrals (some of your contacts recommend a solution based on pricing, uptime or other). I could rehash vendor websites, favorable reviews, and other somewhat biased materials to prove the headline but, as always, I prefer to go my own route, bringing my own biases to the fore.

One of the more disheartening aspects of log collection within the Windows Operating system are the limited number of out of the box events related to security. It is often desirable to capture any unknown or malicious running processes, capture the source process for outbound connections, identify modifications to files and the registry, and to capture command and PowerShell commands that are run on a particular endpoint.  Luckily for systems administrators, Microsoft provides a great tool for this type of log capture within the SysInternals suite called system monitor, or Sysmon.

In 2019, cloud computing hasn’t just hit the mainstream, it is the mainstream. In fact, some experts are predicting that upwards of 80% of enterprise workloads will live in the cloud by 2020.

DevOps as a practice and philosophy includes the communication and teamwork between developers and IT operations. Traditionally, developers and operations are two very different teams who would point fingers when issues would arise with software. DevOps is an attempt to abolish this and has both teams work together. The business result of this is a more stable and reliable software to provide to customers.

Over the past week, news broke about a rogue device that had gone unnoticed on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) IT network. The fact that a Raspberry Pi went unnoticed for almost 10 months is a clear signal of network management issues and lackluster security policies in place within NASA, and other government agencies for that matter.

Working in a DevOps environment, agility is everything. That next release needs to get into production quickly, so even a minor network issue can hamper speed and efficiency.

As a previous sufferer of imposter syndrome, I understand what it's like to feel like you're living someone else's remarkable life doing what someone else should be doing; but not me.

Windows event logs are a tool that every cybersecurity and IT professional should have in his or her arsenal. They can be used locally for troubleshooting or centralized for network awareness. When utilized centrally, powerful software known as a Security Information Event Management (SIEM) can be utilized to parse and search log files. But what if you are working locally?  Is there an efficient method to do the same? You will find the answer to these questions lies in Microsoft’s most powerful tool belt, Microsoft PowerShell.

If you’ve ever said that or even thought it, then you know exactly how much fun taking inventory is. Or is not, rather. Every industry requires periodic asset inventory – that’s just a fact of life.

It’s been predicted for years that most computers will run in the cloud and your screen will be the only connection between you and the cloud. Does that mean the business infrastructures will matter anymore, and what does that mean for the future of network monitoring?

Improper configuration changes to a network—or even just one server on a network—can cause huge issues. They can degrade network performance, shut down key services, and even result in noncompliance with regulatory standards like SOX, PCI, HIPAA and FISMA. And they can compromise network security.

Often perceived as a precursor to Industry 4.0, the rollout of 5G, if the marketing is to be believed, will allow innovations that were previously restricted or unreliable due to lack of bandwidth. Speeds of up to 10Gbps are promised by telecom companies but since we have yet to experience real-life usage scenarios, this is mere speculation.

According to the SANS Institute, Port Scanning is one of the most popular techniques attackers use to discover services that they can exploit to break into systems. In this article, we will discuss some best practices you can employ to defend against attackers and prevent potential network breaches.

Your network is a living, breathing entity. Like a living body or an organic brain, it’s constantly moving things around and changing from moment to moment. Every single individual part is in continuous contact with and reacting to every other part. The job of your monitoring tool is to track all of this.

Many companies that never dreamed they’d be developing their own software are having to “roll their own.” Sometimes it’s an internal-use-only, as a custom layer over an existing platform like Salesforce, sometimes as a product they’re selling. This is what has driven the DevOps methodology over the past several years.