Did you know you have a public Amazon profile that is automatically created when you sign up for an Amazon account? This profile doesn’t provide too much information publicly by default, but it is another data point for 3rd parties. Michael Bazzell from Intel Techniques provided a quick guide in his latest email newsletter on how to take a few easy steps to secure your Amazon profile. The following is an excerpt taken from his email, and is intended only for a quick reference.

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I have attended multiple Wireshark webinars presented by Riverbed and leaders in the field. They title this series “Return to the Packet Trenches” with some sort of variation or subtitle for the different sessions. I always walk away with something new. This latest webinar was no exception. It reviewed several CLI options for creating, analyzing, and editing packet captures. I highly recommend attending these webinars if you have any interest in Wireshark and staring at packets.

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Other than the main character being a manager, it is amazing how close this book mirrors my career path so far. This is fiction, but does a good job introducing business and cloud concepts. I would definitely recommend this for anyone in IT. The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win by Gene Kim My rating: 3 of 5 stars A story that anyone from an IT operations background can relate to.

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As I transition to working in “the cloud” more I am embracing the new technologies and methodologies. However, I’m also trying to replicate what I do in on-prem environments when it makes sense. One way I like to collect and analyze data is using NetFlow. NetFlow provides network conversation details at a higher and summarized level. This has led to quicker recovery time on numerous occasions, or avoided issues entirely.

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I love packets and tracing issues at a micro level. However, like I stated in Preparing for the Capture you need to know where to capture before you can dig into the bits an bytes. In order to know where to capture you must understand your service/app/network. The best way to do that is to diagram your service.

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This is a great read for anyone starting their journey to the cloud, especially AWS! Ahead in the Cloud: Best Practices for Navigating the Future of Enterprise IT by Stephen Orban My rating: 5 of 5 stars View all my reviews

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I generally avoid creating posts that are specific to my employer, but this is already public knowledge and it was fun to be involved even in a small way. So often us “packet junkies” only get to see the results of our work through the lens of smoothly flowing packets. If we’re lucky we might hear the delight in our customer’s voice over the phone or get a nice email sharing the results.

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Performance monitoring is two-fold. There is proactive performance monitoring and reactive investigation. The majority of my posts and case studies reflect the latter. This post is more related to the former. Services on premise typically rely on SLAs, NetFlow, scripts, synthetic transactions and more to provide monitoring and alerting. While some of this is possible in the cloud to keep track of specific pieces, you first need a good foundation by knowing if the underlying technology by your cloud provider is operating as expected.

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