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Latest Blog in Vsceptre

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

How to obtain the metrics for SLO tracking

This is part 2 of the 3 part series “The path to your first SLO”.
When you have a clear understanding of what metrics to gather for SLO, the next question is how to obtain and gather those metrics. Basically the metrics can be obtained by the following methods.

5 May 2023

How to identify the golden metrics for SRE

This is part 1 of the 3 part series “The path to your first SLO”.
When talking about building an observability practice, many customers we talked to struggled on what to observe and usually frustrated with the alarm storms or false alarms. ITOps are concerned about centralized monitoring and gather metrics from different systems for proactive monitoring. App Owners are interested in the ability for fast root cause analysis and end-to-end tracing capabilities. Usually the ITOps take the role of first tier monitoring on the vital health signals of different systems and alert the right app teams for in-depth diagnostics.

29 Apr 2023