1. Active Directory Replication Topology
This article is part of the series covering Active Directory. It is about the replication topology. The route replication traffic travels through a network called the Replication Topology. Replication is an important function within Active Directory that for the most part runs automatically. This post describes three aspects of Replication Topology: Replication of Partitions, Site Links, and Inter Site Topology Generator.

1. HTTP Extraction with Monitis
Say you want to monitor some metric, such as the temperature in your neighborhood, or a stock price, or your number of twitter subscribers. How would you go about doing that? This post shows how to extract content from an http webpage and monitor it using Monitis. M3 – Monitis Monitor Manager is utilized to manage adding monitors to Monitis via API. In the example shown, a temperature is recorded from http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastjson?w=2502265 using a JSON extraction script and fed to Monitis. There is also an attribute for loading HTTP statistics like latency, page size and HTTP code. A graph is shown plotting the temperature in Wanaka, New Zealand.

1. Monitor Everything with Monitis – And do it easily with PowerShell – Part 1
PowerShell is a task-based automation platform for Windows. PowerShell lets you perform tasks simple and easily, using logically named commands, like Get-command, Get-Help, or Send-MailMessage. Monitis has partnered with the PowerShell experts at Start-Automating to allow users to perform monitoring tasks using these simply commands. This article shows how to get started. The first step is to download the necessary files at http://monitis.start-automating.com/ and extract them. Then, by following the steps in this article, a user can create an external monitor to check bing.com with the following command: Add-MonitisExternalMonitor -Name “MyWebSite” -Tag WebMonitors -MonitorType http -Url www.bing.com -ApiKey 20ECHRRRMK88L31KH6OMDU0BNR -SecretKey 26CQ6QUIRF571P1BHU3CV37MR0 It’s really quite simple and powerful because you can automate otherwise repetitive tasks, such as adding many external monitors.

Whether you are running your own IT firm or have a hand in running an IT department for a larger organization, at some point or another you will need to plan for business continuity in the event of some major interruption in business operations.  Regardless of whether that interruption comes in the form of natural disaster, economic disaster, hardware or application failure, security attack, or some other traumatic event, it is your responsibility to ensure that the business can continue, at least from a technological perspective.  While I won’t go into great detail on the intricate development of a continuity plan (there are already many resources on this subject floating around the web), I will mention a few things here that I consider important considerations.

1. Things You May or May Not Know About Linux “find” Command – part III

In the third part of our closer encounter with the find command [(for previous posts, see Part I and Part II] we are going to look into searching for files based on their size, type, owner and permission in accessing/using them.

1. Apache and MySQL Logging with Syslog-ng
This article shows how to use the popular system logging tool Syslog-ng to log Apache and MySQL events. Apache does not log via syslog-ng by default so we go over two methods of easily remedying this. We also show how to use SQL queries to view syslog-ng data.

1. Getting Started with Syslog-ng
All system administrators need to keep a close eye on what is happening within their system, as well as deploy tools that assist in trouble shooting. One such vital tool that all system administrators rely on heavily is the system’s logging utility. Among the most advanced and most popular of these loggers is syslog-ng, which provides features to include message filtering based on level and content, remote logging, uses TCP for transport, can act as a logging server, is able to handle logs from syslogd, and comes with a flexible configuration. This post is an introduction to using syslogd.

1. Monitis (M3) & Nagios – a very simple integration
In this article we show how easy it is to integrate Nagios with Monitis. First read about M3 – a Universal monitoring framework for Monitis custom scripts which was covered in this previous article. We go over an example with code samples showing how to monitor load on a server. We monitor the load with Nagios and push the data to Monitis using a customer monitor.

1. Virtual Machines: Usage & Performance
Virtualization is the process or system that separates the physical hardware from its operating system to provide greater utilization of IT resources and a more flexible system. Virtual machines are a software representation of a physical computer with its own set of virtual hardware within which an operating system and applications are loaded. This post is an overview of virtual machines, including general definitions as well as best practices for backups, performance, and implementation.

We’ve been working hard on new features between May and June 2011, so please take a look at what’s new at Monitis during that period.

LOCATION PERMISSIONS
To make things easier we changed our location permission approach. Before you had to explicitly specify our external locations to use and were bound to those locations. Now you specify only the maximal number of locations and are free to use and combine our external locations however you want.