Insights from our engineering and consulting team
Vsceptre blog
The Disruptive Effects of Mobile Application Outages on Large Enterprises in Hong Kong
In today’s digital age, mobile applications are essential for large enterprises to connect with customers and drive growth. However, even the most meticulously tested apps can experience outages, leading to significant consequences for both users and the organizations behind them. This article explores the impact of unforeseen downtime, the repercussions on end users and company reputation, and how tools like LaunchDarkly can help alleviate these challenges. Learn how enterprises can uphold application reliability and ensure customer satisfaction amidst unexpected disruptions, leveraging Observability tools with the help of Vscetpre and LaunchDarkly.
21 Jan 2025
The build-or-buy dilemma in Feature Management
Organizations invest significant time, often months or even years, into modern application development life cycles. However, deployment can feel like a pivotal moment. While many Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) practices aim to simplify and reduce the stress of deployment by making it a regular occurrence, it can still pose substantial challenges and lead to various issues.
16 Dec 2024
Validating your cyber defence effectiveness through Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS)
BAS is a proactive approach that automates the process of simulating cyber attacks such as phishing campaigns, malware, or exfiltration, to name a few, and then evaluates the organization’s defences. The aim is continuous identification of vulnerabilities across different devices or systems, keep organization ahead of the evolving cyber threats and minimize the security gaps.
9 Dec 2024
Securing Critical Infrastructure: Best Practices for Privileged Access Management (PAM)
In today’s digital landscape, protecting critical infrastructure is crucial for maintaining the stability of essential services. With increasing cyber threats targeting sectors like energy, banking, and healthcare, managing privileged access to critical systems has become more important than ever. Privileged Access Management (PAM), combined with Bastion Hosts (堡垒机), offers a powerful solution to secure these high-risk systems.
4 Dec 2024
Implementing a production ready chatbot solution with governance and monitoring
As a company focused on IT consultancy and system integration, we have accumulated a large number of sales and solution briefs for various products over the past few years. We decided to implement an internal chatbot solution to better support sales activities. To minimize the investment required, we opted for a RAG approach instead of fine-tuning, building a chatbot solution based on a few products we are familiar with. Below is a high-level overview of how everything connects.
6 Nov 2024
Uncovering Suspicious Domain Access in a company Network with Threatbook’s OneDNS and Splunk Stream
As your trusted ally in fortifying digital defenses, we understand that it can be difficult to pinpoint the users who have accessed dubious domains within your network. This task can be even more daunting in a larger-scale environment where the underlying on-prem infrastructure is subject to strict limitations on modifications. Furthermore, you may also ask the questions, how do we classify a domain as a threat, how can we obtain a list of domains that are deemed as malicious and how can we utilise this domain list to correlate the users in your network who have accessed them?
18 Jan 2024
Demystifying Log to Trace correlation in DataDog
If you have a chance to attend any presentation or public seminars from the APM vendors, you may come across some demonstrations of how easily to jump from trace to log or log to trace to diagnose a slow API call. This is one of the key differentiation of using a siloed approach for monitoring vs true full stack visibility. Often times, the technical details and prerequisites of how to achieve this are omitted from those overview demos. Today I am going to take a more detail discussion of how to ensure your application can achieve the log to trace correlation. We use DataDog as the example monitoring backend in this exercise.
21 Sep 2023
Log Sensitive Data Scrubbing and Scanning on Datadog
In today’s digital landscape, data security and privacy have become paramount concerns for businesses and individuals alike. With the increasing reliance on cloud-based services and the need to monitor and analyze application logs, it is crucial to ensure that sensitive data remains protected. Datadog offers robust features to help organizations track and analyze their logs effectively.
6 Sep 2023
Monitoring temperature of my DietPi Homelab cluster with Grafana Cloud
At around end of March, I want to get my hands on the old raspberry pi cluster again as I need a testbed for K8S, ChatOps, CI/CD etc. The DevOps ecosystem in 2023 is more ARM ready compared with 2020 which makes building a usable K8S stack on Pi realistic. I upgraded from a 4 nodes cluster to a 7 Pi4 nodes with POE capabilities, SSD, USB and sitting inside a nice 1U rack. Then spending the next two months’ time on testing various OS. Re-installing the whole stack multiple times and struggling with the home router is fun. At the end the cluster is up with all platform engineering tools deployed.
20 Aug 2023
Setting up the first SLO
This is the final piece of the 3 part series “The path to your first SLO”.
We have discussed on the basics of what to observe and how to get the relevant metrics in part 1 and part 2 of this series. This time we are going to have a quick look on to setup a simple service availability monitoring SLO with Nobl9 and SolarWinds Pingdom.
10 May 2023