General It

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) sure does pack a punch for something with “Simple” in its name.

Windows has several methods in place for finding restart information, but most of these solutions are difficult to use when querying multiple computers and don’t provide historical information. In this article, we’ll review the options available and then look at how to get the information you need via PowerShell.

If you’re looking for a cloud database service in Amazon Web Services (AWS), which service do you choose? Amazon Redshift or Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)? The answer may surprise you.

Networks have become vital strategic assets for every modern enterprise. And, as we usher in the new year, networks will only continue to grow in terms of value, significance, and complexity. It's our job as IT pros to figure out how things will change and prepare for all contingencies.

Last month, we released WhatsUp Gold 2019.1, and with it, the addition of a powerful REST API that lets you easily integrate other systems or your own scripts with WUG.

With the new REST API, you can now use an extensive range of REST API calls to get data from WhatsUp Gold from other systems, or input data to WhatsUp Gold or have other systems make changes. The result is a huge range of automation use cases that will help IT teams be faster and more efficient. Example use cases include the ability to automatically put devices in maintenance mode before making changes, the ability to add or remove devices and monitors automatically, and more.

Wouldn't it be great if you could get an automatic alert every time something in your house or car broke, like when a spark plug or fuse failed, or when a light bulb went out? That way you could fix those problems before they caused you any trouble... If only. For most of us, the prospect of such a smart home is still a distant glimmer in the future, but for IT teams (and others) working in a modern enterprise, you can get automatic notifications when parts of your infrastructure fail, and you can fix those failures before they cause problems. How? With the IT swiss army knife/ticketing system known as ServiceNow.

In many jurisdictions, there is a legislative or accounting requirement to store data for a minimum of five years. Easier said than done. That's why multiple data backups are necessary.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Here’s a familiar refrain in IT media: Today’s corporate networks are much different than they were 10, five, or even two years ago. It’s cliched, but it’s true: Modern IT networks are bigger, messier, and more dynamic than they used to be. For system and network administrators, that means it's now a lot more difficult to keep track of what's connected to your network.

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.

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.

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.

If you are a systems administrator or a security engineer, it is probable you have a requirement to filter and forward Windows event logs either directly or hierarchically. There are many alternatives available to accomplish this goal, one of which is Windows Event Forwarding (WEF).  In this article, you will learn to configure a simple source initiated WEF subscription which utilizes the HTTP protocol to forward events between a client and a collector in a single domain.

In this episode of Defrag This, we  discuss the nuances of IT networks in dangerous industries.

Log data can be a tremendous resource for protecting digital assets against cyber attacks. Trouble is, trying to make sense of all the logs generated by IT networks is like pointing a fire hose at someone dying of thirst. They’re desperate for a drink, but they simply can’t handle that much water all at once!