Submarine cables: The true backbone of the Internet (video documentary!)

Did you know that less than 1% of the global Internet traffic is transmitted via satellites? The actual workhorses are 1.1 million kilometers of submarine cables that lay on the bottom of the ocean floor. More than 400 of these cables connect the continents and make the Internet a really global thing. But how did they get there and how do they survive?

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I finally found a reason again to have a screensaver on my PC

Ever since our monitors support power-safe modes we had little reason to use animated screen-savers anymore. When we don’t use the computer the monitors are turned off and go dark. Safe the planet! And I have to confess that I didn’t install any fancy screensavers for years.

But the other day I came across a screensaver that by itself is reason enough to leave the monitor on a little longer. Apple had created an “Aerial” screensaver for Apple TV that uses gorgeous, slow moving aerial video shots from drones and helicopters as screensaver material. And some guy found out where and how the data is stored… Now there are versions for OSX, Windows and Linux.

Continue reading “I finally found a reason again to have a screensaver on my PC”

Survey: What is your acceptance of the cloud for your company’s IT?

Paessler wants to understand what system administrators of small and medium-sized businesses around the world think about “the cloud” and how far acceptance for cloud computing has come. Results will be published in Paessler’s blog shortly after the end of this survey.

If you are an administrator working for an SMB please submit your vote (it takes less than 5 minutes!). All participants will be entered into a raffle to win one of ten $ 100 Amazon vouchers, or local equivalent.

Take the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QX9D5HW

Rightscale’s “STATE OF THE CLOUD REPORT 2017” is here

Cloud service company Rightscale has published its annual “State of the cloud report” for 2017.

Here are a few highlights:

  • Companies are already using 4 different clouds and experimenting with 4 more, and a majority of workloads are now running in cloud (private or public)
  • 95 percent of organizations surveyed are running applications or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service
  • Private clouds are loosing: Private cloud adoption fell from 77 percent to 72 percent
  • Azure increases market penetration, reducing the AWS lead: Overall Azure adoption grew from 20 to 34 percent of respondents, while AWS stayed flat at 57 percent of respondents.
  • Enterprises run 75 percent of workloads in the cloud with more in private cloud (43 percent) vs. public cloud (32 percent).
  • SMBs run 83 percent of workloads in the cloud with more in public cloud (50 percent) vs. private cloud (33 percent).

Continue reading “Rightscale’s “STATE OF THE CLOUD REPORT 2017” is here”

How to create a free chatbot to access your PRTG server status with Facebook Messenger in 15 minutes

Within just a few minutes you can create a very simple and free chatbot for Facebook Messenger that is able to access your monitoring status from your PRTG. In this blog article I will use the ChatFuel service (www.chatfuel.com) to create such a chatbot, and connect it to my PRTG server.

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Which low-cost Windows 10 tablet is the best low-budget remote probe for PRTG Network Monitor?

Ten days ago I started using four ultra low-cost ATOM-processor based tablets (running under Windows 10) as monitoring stations (or “remote probes”, as we call them in the context of PRTG). Each of them was monitoring about 100 sensors in my home lan, including wifi quality and temperature. Here are my experiences of the first 10 days:

Continue reading “Which low-cost Windows 10 tablet is the best low-budget remote probe for PRTG Network Monitor?”