What is Application Performance Management (APM)? Like a lot of good
questions, it depends on your business needs. What is the goal of an ideal
APM? Does it mean 99.999% availability? Perhaps it is a favorable overall
end user experience when using the application but, as compared to what?
My point is that Application Performance Management / Monitoring means
different things to different businesses and it can even depend on the
application involved.
What is the Goal of APM
“Begin with the goal in mind.” I wish I could take credit for that
quote. What is the goal of the APM? Have you listed out the objectives you
hope to obtain from your APM strategy? This approach will help your team
ensure satisfaction with the final solution chosen. Here are some examples.
Minimum of 99.999% availability with lower Mean Time To Know (MTTK) and Mean
Time To Repair (MTTR) Less ... (more)
Ever since I first published here my tentative list of Top Players in the
Cloud Computing Ecosystem - now expanded to a list of 250 and growing daily
thanks to community feedback via my Twitter account (@jg21) and a very kind
mention by ReadWriteWeb - there have been suggestions that another prism
through which to view cloud computing might be that of people rather than
companies.
Now Michael Sheehan has encouraged me to Just Do It, so let me get
started...as per the previous Top Cloud Players list, this list will a
work-in-progress and is totally porous, so don't hesitate to ping or tweet me
if there are folks I have missed. In particular if you are a journalist whose
"beat" is Cloud Computing, please let's be hearing from you, and we can maybe
widen this list from Cloud Bloggers to Cloud Commentators. For now though
let's get started. In alphabetical order - to av... (more)
When I was casually examining my server log few months back, I noticed
something was going off beam. To my horror, the primary server crashed,
unable to take the load. Usually, I don't get that much traffic. Months
later, I realized that I was the victim of a DDOS attack. Being a hacker type
myself, I tried to investigate where I failed in my system administration.
And I started learning Raw Socket programming, in an effort to understand how
powerful it is under Linux. To my surprise, I realized any lamer can build up
Raw Socket applications and can effectively misuse this wonderful trait . I'd
like to share some of the interesting Raw Socket exploits. Don't ever try
this!
All along I was wondering if I could spoof my IP address and perform a SYN
Flood attack on a server using C with my Linux box (2.4.1), as I found out
that the hackers spoofed their source IP and ... (more)
Does the open source community provide world-class security technology? Can
organizations stop dealing with commercial vendors for security software?
To avoid any undue suspense, the answers are: "Emphatically yes" and "Maybe,
but you probably need to make an investment of some kind." But let's take a
look at the evidence - this article references two open source projects:
netfilter and Snort. Escalating ChallengesFirst, it's clear that the
challenges related to security are escalating. Outbreaks of viruses and worms
are becoming more virulent and spreading faster. Blended threats and
application-specific attacks are becoming more sophisticated and harder to
detect. Wireless communications, instant messaging, and peer-to-peer networks
are opening new holes in corporate defenses. Top management is taking a
sudden and unaccustomed interest in IT security. Yet IT depart... (more)
On the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 12,000 for the first
time since June 2008, it was impossible not to correlate the eloquence and
optimism of President Obama's "State of the Union" speech on Tuesday night
with the restoration of a sense of perspective and hope in the USA about the
future.
Obama grasped the nettle full-on. "We are poised for progress," he declared,
adding:
"Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock
market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is
growing."
As one blogger expressed it, though - and he is a former Goldman Sachs trader
called Tyler Durden, so he ought to know wheref he speaks:
"There was a massive pink elephant in the room called reality though."
Durden's gripe is with what he deems to be the unreality of Obama's praising
Google and Facebook so highly in an Ameri... (more)
[The following open letter appeared on Friday on the NewsForge Web site,
complete with redactions as marked. LinuxWorld readers can also read Kevin
Bedell's recent interview with ESR.]
Mr. McBride:
Late yesterday I learned that you have charged that your company is the
victim of an insidious conspiracy masterminded by IBM. You have urged the
press and public to believe that the Open Source Initiative and the Free
Software Foundation and Red Hat and Novell and various Linux enthusiasts are
up in arms not because of beliefs or interests of their own, but because
little gray men from Armonk have put them up to it. Bwahahaha! Fire up the
orbital mind-control lasers!
Very few things could possibly illustrate the brain-boggling disconnect
between SCO and reality with more clarity than hearing you complain about how
persecuted your compan... (more)
When people hear that open source software is often free and overall cheaper
than proprietary solutions, they're intrigued. But how much cheaper is
another question. What other costs are involved? This article examines the
budgetary impact of migrating corporate desktops to open source solutions.
This is one of many areas where open source can positively impact IT budgets.
Classifying Desktops
The first step in evaluating the license savings on the desktop is to
determine which desktops in your organization are candidates for migrating to
Linux, OpenOffice, or both.
Step One: Inventory and Distribution
Do a complete inventory of desktop applications in your organization. Be sure
to interview users directly, since some may be dependent on Windows-specific
applications that the IT department neither knows about nor supports. Once
you have an accurate inventory of deskto... (more)
"We make no endorsement of SCO nor do we make any admission as to their
claims," said EV1's CEO Robert Marsh in a letter to customers - a statement
which did not head off the inevitable knee-jerk reaction such as a call for a
boycott of EV1 Servers, which has 18,000 Windows and Linux dedicated servers.
But the EV1 announcement earlier this week of the purchase of UNIX licenses
from SCO is nothing compared to yesterday's copyright infringement lawsuit
announcement: the first against an end user of Linux: car parts retailer
AutoZone.
AutoZone was named in the first lawsuit and SCO is seeking damages for
unauthorised use of its intellectual property - specifically, for porting
its inventory/kiosk applications to Linux, with IBM's help, allegedly by
using SCO shared libraries that AutoZone didn't have the rights to.
EV1's Marsh as good as admitted yesterday that the bla... (more)
Related Links: Linus Torvalds Reveals How He Herds the Cats of the Linux
Kernel
Already named this year one of the most influential people in the world by
Time Magazine, Linus Torvalds has done it again: he's won himself a top award
- this time it's one of this year's prestigious Innovations Awards, organized
by The Economist.
When asked recently what makes him believe Linux will continue to gain
momentum, Torvalds replied: "I think, fundamentally, open source does tend
to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things," continuing:
"I compare it to science vs. witchcraft. In science, the whole system builds
on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In
witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed
others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like
witchcraft. In history, wi... (more)
EnterpriseDB, based in Edison, New Jersey, has developed an open-source
database approach built on PostgreSQL and offering Oracle compability. Andy
Astor, co-founder and CEO said the company will offer "enterprise class"
functionality and capability with its EnterpriseDB (EDB) software, which is
available immediately for download at www.enterprisedb.com.
Astor and Doug Lussier, co-founder and Chief Architect, said in an exclusive
interview with SYS-CON.TV that their company's strategy will initially target
MySQL in its quest for new customers. The co-founders mentioned that they
will eventually be competing for Oracle customers as well, but have stressed
that MySQL is their initial competition.
The EnterpriseDB system includes a database server, an RDMBS engine, and
something called EDB Studio, a graphical console which enables access from
JDBC, ODBC, .NET, ESQL/C++, ... (more)
Yahoo has tied up with Tata subsidiary Computational Research Laboratories
(CRL) to do cloud computing research. Financial terms were not disclosed.
What CRL brings to the party is the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the
world, a beast that Yahoo figures has “substantially more processors
than any other supercomputer currently available for cloud research”
– 14,400 of them to be precise along with 28TB of memory, 140TB of disk
space, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations a second and sustained
computation capacity of 120 teraflops.
Yahoo is kicking in its expertise with Apache Hadoop, the open source
distributed computing project.
The machine, which is called the EKA, the only supercomputer funded by the
private sector and available for use on commercial terms, is supposed to run
the latest version of Hadoop and other Yahoo-supported open ... (more)
Public clouds dominate IT conversations but the next phase of cloud evolutions are "multi" hybrid cloud environments. The winners in the cloud services industry will be those organizations that understand how to leverage these technologies as complete service solutions for specific customer verticals. In turn, both business and IT actors throughout the enterprise will need to increase their engagement with multi-cloud deployments today while planning a technology strategy that will constitute a significant part of their IT budgets in the very near future. As IoT solutions are growing rapidly, as well as security challenges growing exponentially, without a doubt, the cloud world is about to change for the better. Again.
DevOps environments can look dissimilar from one organization to another, and – depending on organizational requirements or use cases – preferred container registries, tools and workflows can all be different said Tim Erlin, vice president of product management and strategy at Tripwire. “We've expanded our DevOps security solutions to work with numerous environments in order to help more organizations embed security into their DevOps practices. By building consistent security practices between DevOps environments and the rest of the organization, Tripwire helps incorporate security consistently across the DevOps life cycle – from build to pre-deployment to production.
On-premise or off, you have powerful tools available to maximize the value of your infrastructure and you demand more visibility and operational control. Fortunately, data center management tools keep a vigil on memory contestation, power, thermal consumption, server health, and utilization, allowing better control no matter your cloud's shape. In this session, learn how Intel software tools enable real-time monitoring and precise management to lower operational costs and optimize infrastructure for today even as you're forecasting for tomorrow.
BMC has unmatched experience in IT management, supporting 92 of the Forbes Global 100, and earning recognition as an ITSM Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for five years running. Our solutions offer speed, agility, and efficiency to tackle business challenges in the areas of service management, automation, operations, and the mainframe.
PrinterLogic helps IT professionals eliminate all print servers and deliver a highly available serverless print infrastructure. With PrinterLogic's centrally managed direct IP printing platform, customers empower their end users with mobile printing, secure release printing, and many advanced features that legacy print management applications can't provide. The company has been included multiple times on the Inc. 500 and Deloitte Fast 500 lists of fastest growing companies in North America.
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