System Management Survey

Survey form - for taking surveys ;-)

If you manage, secure, or plan for IT environments or DevOps, we’d love for you to take our System Management survey. Right now, we’re busy planning on how to make the Assimilation Suite better in 2016. Your responses will be a huge help in giving us a sharp focus on how best to improve IT management for you and others in the IT community. If you can help us out, we’ll send you a small token of our appreciation

Assimilation Release 1.1.2 “Happy 2016” is out!

Download Assimilation Release 1.1.2 - the Happy 2016 release

On January 2nd we put out version 1.1.2 of the Assimilation System Management Suite – the Happy 2016 release. This release adds enhancements related to best practice analyses and adds support for openSUSE, Scientific, and ScientificFermi Linux – along with a few bug fixes. We also have some surveys that we’d love for people to take – to help direct us in our future work.
As we have in the past, we offer supported free trials of the Linux version of our system management suite – just follow the download link and the instructions you’ll find there.

Bufferbloat: A Network Best Practice You’re Probably Doing Wrong

bufferbloat illustration via a fat overflowing beer mug

You may have heard of bufferbloat, but even many good network admins have not. If you haven’t changed settings to avoid it, then you aren’t doing it right. But what is it, why should you care, and what should you do about it? If you see your network access stutter occasionally for no apparent reason, then read on – it may be that bufferbloat is at fault. The good news is that if you’re running on a recent Linux system, it’s easy to set up correctly.

Assimilation Monitoring Rules – Keys to Automated Monitoring

ruler with level - Assimilation Monitoring Rules - pun intended. No apologies ;-)

The Assimilation System Management Suite monitors servers and services automatically – which is way cool! This article explains how to create Assimilation monitoring rules which teach the Assimilation software when and how to use monitoring agents. These rules are the keys to fully automated monitoring. When your monitoring is fully automated, complexity goes down, and availability goes up.

Assimilation Event API Overview – Integrating it with your systems

Assimilation Event API

When you have a powerful discovery and monitoring system like the Assimilation Suite, it’s essential to connect it into your existing processes, so that people can be notified when interesting events occur. In this post, we walk through the Assimilation Event API with emphasis on the things you need to know to note a service or server going up or down.

Why I’m Thankful in 2015

Give Thanks in all things - thankful, thankfulness, gratitude

Here in the US, this Thursday is celebrated as Thanksgiving – a day set aside to express our gratitude for the many blessings we’ve received in the last year.
The last few years have been incredible at work, in my family, and at home, so I wanted to share with you a few of the reasons I’m thankful.

Download new Assimilation Release 1.1.0 – Free Trial!

Download Assimilation Version 1.1.0

Those of you who’ve been following my blog for a while know something about the Assimilation System Management Suite – how it provides an always up-to-date CMDB, integrated monitoring, continuous security monitoring, and an up-to-date network map – in an incredibly scalable way with near-zero configuration – and how it does all this without setting of network security alarms.

If you haven’t given it a try yet, now is the perfect time – because we just announced version 1.1.0 of the Assimilation Suite, and to celebrate we’re offering a limited number of supported free trials.

The 2015 Open Source Monitoring Conference

2015 Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMC 2015)

I just got an email from Bernd Erk, saying that the 2015 Open Source Monitoring Conference is filling up. From my perspective, that’s a good thing, because we have a great talk and demo to give there and are excited to be speaking there again. From your perspective, this may be a good thing only if you hurry up and register – since this is the only conference we’ve spoken at outside the US this year.