Observability

A practical guide to Active Directory Federation Services for a resilient Microsoft 365 ecosystem In our previous blog on how to monitor Microsoft 365 (M365), we delved into service overviews and the critical importance of synthetic user login monitoring. In this blog, we set our sights on a core component that forms the backbone of secure identity and access management: Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS). As organizations increasingly migrate their operations to the cloud, ensuring the robustness of identity and authentication mechanisms becomes paramount. AD FS plays a pivotal role in this landscape, acting as the linchpin for seamless and secure single sign-on (SSO) experiences within the M365 ecosystem. ...

Your adventure in the world of observability, performance optimization, and security begins here. In the fast-paced world of software development, the quest for smoother, more efficient applications feels like a never-ending adventure. But in this adventure, it’s not about slaying dragons or uncovering hidden treasures; it’s about ensuring your code performs seamlessly and your users are happy. As a developer, I’ve faced the challenges of reactive observability, where we typically identify and resolve issues only after they’ve disrupted our applications. It’s a scenario that’s all too familiar for many of us. Adding New Relic CodeStream to your tool inventory can help rescue your team from a perilous fate and bring their observability game to a new level. ...

One of the most popular and widely adopted business tool suites is Microsoft 365 (previously known as Microsoft Office 365) or just M365 for short. M365 offers a comprehensive array of applications and services, including email, document collaboration, video conferencing, and more, all hosted on the cloud. M365 provides numerous benefits in terms of flexibility and accessibility, but it also introduces new security, performance, and compliance challenges. This is why monitoring M365 applications is critically important for organizations of all sizes. Monitoring M365 applications is essential in helping businesses maintain a secure, efficient, and compliant digital environment. ...

Enabling a true “shift-left” in software security by empowering DevOps and security teams to work together In some recent articles I shared how you as a developer can add security to your skillset by using New Relic capabilities. I also dug deeper into ways on how to mitigate hidden security risks of open source software libraries. Both of these blogs focused on third-party code and how it can impact the security of your software applications. In this article I will focus on the security of your own custom code, i.e. the code that you write yourself. ...

Check your source code for any vulnerable libraries and start mitigating these issues Open source software libraries have become an integral part of modern software development. They are widely used by developers to accelerate the development process and reduce costs. On average, open source libraries make up 70-90% of an entire software application. However, the use of open source libraries also comes with hidden security risks that could potentially harm your organization’s reputation and financial well-being. ...

Not every developer is a security expert, but use these tips to improve your skills In today’s digital age, security is a major concern for individuals and organizations alike. With the increasing number of cyber-attacks and data breaches, it’s crucial for developers to have a thorough understanding of security best practices. The security of an application is of the utmost importance, as it can directly impact the safety and privacy of users’ data. ...

In a recent post I wrote about the ability to send all your application security vulnerabilities found by Snyk directly to your New Relic observability platform. Now, New Relic made it even easier to achieve that by providing a dedicated security ingest processor that ‘understands’ the payload from a Snyk webhook. All the details on how to get started, create and configure a Snyk webhook to send into your New Relic account is provided in this docs page: https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/vulnerability-management/integrations/snyk/ ...

Security and observability data go hand in hand when it comes to application health. If you can put those two sources of data behind a single pane of glass you can make your life a lot easier. By leveraging the different options that the Snyk platform provides, you can send all your application security vulnerabilities found by Snyk directly to your New Relic observability platform. Let’s see how! Prerequisites Here are all the necessary links to get started: ...

TL;DR Leverage a Prometheus Exporter to send all your application security vulnerabilities from Snyk into Splunk. Here are all the necessary links to get started: Snyk Exporter: https://github.com/lunarway/snyk_exporter Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector for Kubernetes: https://docs.splunk.com/Observability/gdi/opentelemetry/install-k8s.html#otel-install-k8s Update (2022-09-22) The option that I am describing here is just one way to achieve this. There might even be a more straight forward option available that I started to describe in a more recent post. Please find an additional approach in my post Snyk Integration Capabilities with WebHooks - some examples. ...

It was back in 2019 at Microsoft Ignite in Orlando when I discovered a new project referred to as Distributed Application Runtime, or Dapr for short. This immediately caught my attention and Mark Russinovich did an amazing job presenting this to the audience. Dapr is quite an interesting project for me in many ways. First of all, software architecture is near and dear to my heart and Dapr solves a lot of the challenges developers typically face when designing and implementing applications. Its portable, event-driven runtime makes it easy for developers to build resilient, stateless and stateful microservices applications that run on the cloud or edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks. ...