Tutorials

Understanding File Server Permissions

By Amakiri Welekwe on September 5, 2024

In today’s digital landscape, data security and efficient resource management are crucial for any organization. An organization’s file server provides a centralized location for storing and managing files. File servers not only store critical information but also facilitate access to it by multiple users and applications, making them indispensable in both small businesses and large […]

How To See Active Directory User Login History (And Audit Logon Logoff Data)

By Amakiri Welekwe on September 5, 2024

Active Directory (AD) underpins many contemporary IT environments by managing user accounts, computers, and permissions. Monitoring and auditing user login history in AD is essential for maintaining security, ensuring compliance, and diagnosing potential issues within an organization. This article will walk you through viewing Active Directory user login history and auditing logon and logoff data. […]

Active Directory Account Expiration Dates Explained

By John Cirelly on August 12, 2024

AD account expiration dates can be challenging to manage, especially for larger organizations. Below, we’ll touch on some common account questions, and even explore how you can reliably automate your account expirations and access. What Are Active Directory Account Expiration Dates? Active Directory account expiration dates are predefined dates when a user account becomes inactive. […]

What Is Conditional Access? Everything You Need To Know

By John Cirelly on August 8, 2024

Are you curious about Conditional Access? Below, we’ll demystify how it works, how to implement it, and what to avoid when using it across your network. What is Conditional Access? Conditional Access is a security policy framework used to enforce specific access controls based on defined conditions. It evaluates signals such as user identity, location, […]

What Is User Behavior Analytics?

By John Cirelly on August 8, 2024

User behavior analytics can be quite complex, but it doesn’t have to be. Below, I’ll simplify how it works, touch on some best practices, and share some tools and tips to help you get it set up quickly for yourself. What Is User Behavior Analytics? User Behavior Analytics (UBA) focuses on tracking and analyzing user […]

Beginner’s Guide: Grafana

By John Cirelly on May 16, 2024

According to GrafanaLabs, Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics program. Your data can be queried, viewed, and explored irrespective of the location in which it is stored. Simply said, it gives you the tools you need to transform the data in your time-series database (TSDB) into attractive graphs and visualizations. Why do Companies Utilize […]

Beginner’s Guide: Kibana

By John Cirelly on May 16, 2024

Kibana is a tool that is used for log and time-series analytics, application monitoring, and operational intelligence use cases. It also allows for the visualization and study of data. Histograms, line graphs, pie charts, heat maps, and built-in support for geographic analysis are just some of the sophisticated and user-friendly features offered by this software. […]

Beginner’s Guide: Graphite

By John Cirelly on May 15, 2024

Graphite is a comprehensive monitoring tool that may be used in either straightforward or intricate settings. It is possible to utilize it for the monitoring of a wide variety of networked systems, such as websites, applications, services, and servers in both on-premises and cloud-based settings. This variety of options is useful for businesses that fall […]

Beginner’s Guide: collectd

By John Cirelly on August 16, 2022

Metrics are a technique to acquire insight into the trends and problems inside your IT system. This necessity for effective infrastructure monitoring has led to the emergence of metrics as a solution to this problem. collectd is a daemon that is available as open source and collects performance measurements for both the system and applications. […]

Beginner’s Guide: Riemann

By John Cirelly on August 16, 2022

The monitoring tool known as Riemann collects events from hosts and applications and can then input those events into a stream processing language so that they can be altered, summarized, or acted upon. The goal of the Riemann platform is to automate the process of monitoring and measuring events as much as possible. What actually […]

Beginner’s Guide: Host sFlow

By John Cirelly on August 16, 2022

The sFlow protocol is utilized for the Host sFlow agent to export both physical and virtual server performance metrics. The agent offers scalable, multi-vendor, multi-operating system performance monitoring while having a minimal impact on the systems that are being monitored. The Host sFlow project provides an open-source implementation of the sFlow standard, reporting on server […]

Beginner’s Guide: Sensu

By John Cirelly on August 16, 2022

Sensu is an open-source solution for monitoring infrastructure and applications. It monitors the health of servers, services, and applications and can integrate with third-party tools to deliver alerts and notifications. Sensu is a messaging system that is written in Ruby and can process messages using either RabbitMQ or Redis. Data is stored in Redis using […]

Beginner’s Guide: Nagios Core

By John Cirelly on August 16, 2022

Nagios Core is the primary event scheduler, event processor, and alert manager for monitored elements. It is a daemon developed in C for performance and designed to run natively on systems, with several APIs that allow it to execute extra functions. What Exactly is Nagios? Nagios is available free of charge and can be used […]

How to Query Cisco ISE Using TACACS

By John Cirelly on August 9, 2022

The Cisco Identity Services Engine, or Cisco ISO, is a powerful platform for network access control policy and enforcement. It supports the TACACS+ protocol, which makes it possible to perform detailed controls and audits on network configurations and devices. You have the option of configuring your network devices to submit authentication and authorization requests to […]

How to add a static route using a PowerShell cmdlet

By John Cirelly on August 9, 2022

Since static routes do not take part in any kind of automatic discovery process, it is very easy to manage and configure them. A list of potential destinations can be generated using a static route by combining the network address of the destination with the subnet mask. Static routes are very straightforward. The Windows operating […]