2018 – Pingdom Year in Review
January 9, 2019
We thought we’d look back at the highs and lows of 2018 and share with you some stats about last year’s internet performance, and discuss a potential trend for this year.
Common API Vulnerabilities and How to Secure Them
January 7, 2019
Application programming interfaces (APIs) have become a critical part of almost every business. APIs are responsible for transferring information between systems within a company or to external companies. However, given the sensitive data being transferred through APIs, it’s critical to secure them. Increasingly sophisticated attacks occur every year, requiring better security controls and monitoring. In this article, we’ll give you an overview of the vulnerabilities of APIs, which hackers can take advantage of, and we’ll show you how to secure them.
An In-Depth Guide to Web Server Monitoring
January 4, 2019
Web servers are among the most important components in modern IT infrastructures. They host the websites, web services, and web applications that we use on a daily basis. Social networking, media streaming, software as a service (SaaS), and other activities wouldn’t be possible without the use of web servers. And with the cloud computing craze moving more services online, web servers, and web server monitoring as a result, are only becoming more important.
How to Log Amazon Alexa Apps and Improve User Experience
December 21, 2018
Efficiently managing this data is made easier with a log management tool. In this tutorial, we’ll show you to log from Alexa skills. Our skill is written as an Amazon Lambda function and we’ll show you how to track logs to Papertrail. Then, you can identify common misunderstood phrases and use them to improve your voice app. By reading this article, you will learn how to connect hardware to the Internet of Things (IoT), log the data it sends you, and leverage that data to improve your product.
Improve Live Ops for Games Using Papertrail
December 14, 2018
Live Ops is an ever-increasing practice in the gaming world. Games today often include multiplayer competition, events, the ability to trade items, and more. These require backend services and a platform team to set up and manage those services. They also require customer support to interact with players who experience issues and to make adjustments as needed. All these pieces need to be working flawlessly to deliver a good experience and retain players whom you worked hard to get.
Monitor User Experience Using Client-Side JSON Logs
December 13, 2018
Logging is one of the most useful tools available for developers. It allows them to view and understand the inner workings of their application, even while it’s actively running. It is absolutely essential during development; hunting down bugs and broken points in a project would be impossible without it. However, with the rise of client-side rendering and SPAs, it’s becoming common for the frontend application to handle the vast majority of the user experience.
Benchmarking 5 Popular Load Balancers: Nginx, HAProxy, Envoy, Traefik, and ALB
December 10, 2018
When choosing a load balancer to front your application’s traffic, there are several factors to consider. Achieving the right balance of features, operator usability, and performance depends on the type of software you’re running, how it’s architected, and what platform it’s running on. While often less of a concern than these other factors, it’s still important to understand the performance profiles of these load balancers under different types of load. In this article, we will test five different popular load balancers: NGINX, HAProxy, Envoy, Traefik, and Amazon Application Load Balancer (ALB).
Secure Your App: Monitor Intrusions with Papertrail
December 6, 2018
In today’s world, malware and vulnerabilities are a growing threat that can impact any network from small to large. These threats can expose personal data, compromise financial account details, hold critical data for ransom, or destroy data entirely. It is important to understand what vulnerabilities might exist within your environment, and what you can do not only to mitigate risk, but react to an active attack in progress. This article will show you how to monitor your network traffic and react to an active intrusion with SolarWinds® Papertrail™.
Introduction to Infrastructure Monitoring in a Dynamic Cloud Environment
December 5, 2018
Infrastructure monitoring is a vital part of infrastructure management, which involves managing the equipment, policies, processes, and other resources that affect an organization’s IT foundation. Two primary management goals are minimizing downtime and increasing efficiency. To accomplish this, IT teams need to collect and analyze data from each component. This data is provided through monitoring.
Monitoring Back Pressure When Your Infrastructure is Pushed to the Limit
November 28, 2018
Back pressure is a signal that a service is at capacity and cannot accept more load. You’ve probably experienced back pressure without even knowing it. How can we better manage back pressure and respond gracefully when it happens? We will run through an example of pushing WordPress to its limit to see what breaks first. We’ll also show you tools to monitor and find the root cause of back pressure in multi-tier applications.