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Working safely online

Remote work? Eliminate digital threats with a VPN for business.

What is a VPN?

VPNs are secure and private networks inside the internet

A VPN is a Virtual private network. As with any private network, the information you send and receive on a VPN is inside a protected “pipe” from other computers and the Internet.

You can use it like your home/office or business network, which you use to share files between devices across your router. Nobody outside the network can see that data if your network is properly secured. That’s why a VPN gives you security.

What can be connected to the VPN

  • VPN from your laptop/desktop computer at home or when you travel to your office network, to share files, check systems, remote printing, etc.
  • VPN from 1 datacenter to another.
  • VPN between offices across internet, same or different cities, different countries, even continents.
  • VPN server to connect your systems (office and/or datacenter) to you and/or your employees.

Quality NOC can set up a your own VPN server for you, we can monitor and maintain the system UP and running 24/7.

For more information, send us your email.

 

Top video conference solutions to work remotely

Here you have a summary of the main features of these video conference (Free) solutions to help you work remotely.
For business day to day work, share screen and file sharing is a must have feature. Check out the number of video conference participants that can join on different applications.

Google Meet (meet.google.com)
*Multiplatform
*Video conference up to 100
*Share screen
*Chat

WhatsApp.com
*Multiplatform (apps and whatsapp web)
*easy to use
*video conference up to 4
*only from mobile App

Facetime
*only IOS (iPhone, iPad)

Microsoft Teams (teams.microsoft.com)
(comes with office 365)
*Multiplatform
*Voice call
*Video conference, live events up to 10000
*Share screen
*Host controls

Wire.com
(enhanced encryption)
*Multiplatform
*Voice call
*Video conference
*Web and mobile App
*Share screen
*Chat

Zoom.us
*Multiplatform
*Voice call
*Video conference up to 100
*40 min limit on the free version
*Share screen
*Host controls
*Recording

Instagram
*Multiplatform
*video conference up to 6
*you can use IG filters.

Skype.com
*Multiplatform
*Voice call
*Video conference up to 10
*Web and mobile App
*Share screen
*Chat

Google Hangouts (hangouts.google.com)
*Multiplatform
*Video conference up to 10
*Share screen
*Chat

Remote monitoring and alerting for IoT

How tools and practices used for monitoring cloud-native services apply to solutions that use IoT devices. Add operations visibility to remote locations.

Introduction

IoT devices produce many types of information, including telemetry, metadata, state, and commands and responses

Telemetry data from devices can be used in short operational timeframes or for longer-term analytics and model building.

Many devices support local monitoring in the form of a buzzer or an alarm panel on-premises. This type of monitoring is valuable, but has limited scope for in-depth or long-term analysis. This article instead discusses remote monitoring, which involves gathering and analyzing monitoring information from a remote location using cloud resources.

Operational and device performance data is often in the form of a time series, where each piece of information includes a time stamp. This data can be further enriched with dimensional labels (sometimes referred to as tags), such as labels that identify hardware revision, operating timezone, installation location, firmware version, and so on.

Time-series telemetry can be collected and used for monitoring. Monitoring in this context refers to using a suite of tools and processes that help detect, debug, and resolve problems that occur in systems while those systems are operating. Monitoring can also give you insight into the systems and help improve them.

The state of monitoring IT systems, including servers and services, has continuously improved. Monitoring tools and practices in the cloud-native world of microservices and Kubernetes are excellent at monitoring based on time-series metric data. These tools aren’t designed specifically for monitoring IoT devices or physical processes, but the constituent parts—labeled series of metrics, visualization, and alerts—all can apply to IoT monitoring.

What are you monitoring?

Monitoring begins with collecting data by instrumenting the system you’re working with. For some IoT scenarios, the system you’re monitoring might not be the devices themselves, but the environment and the process external to the device. In other scenarios, you might be interested in monitoring the performance health of the devices themselves, both individually and at the fleet level.

Consider the task of monitoring a human cyclist riding on a road. There are many different parts of the overall system you can monitor. Some might be internal to the system, such as the cyclist’s heart rate or sweating rate. Others might be external to the cyclist, such as a slope of the road, or external temperature and humidity. These internal and external monitoring goals can coexist. The methodologies and tools might overlap, but you can recognize these different domains—a physician might care about different measurements than the bike mechanic. Monitoring tools can be used to create custom monitoring views.

For example, you might organize your metrics into the categories that are discussed in this section. The specifics of how these are structured or combined will depend on the particular domain and applications.

Device hardware metrics

Device hardware metrics are measurements of the hardware or physical device itself, usually with some sort of built-in sensor. 

Firmware

Software running on the devices includes application software as well as the system software itself, which might be the operating system, or layers of a networking stack or device drivers. 

Application code

Application code on the device is specific to the role that device is performing in the system. 

External environment

Measuring the environment with sensors is often what people think about with regard to IoT devices. 

Cloud device interactions

An IoT solution is a complex system that includes software components that run both on the device and in the cloud. Understanding how these two systems interact requires you to understand what information each side has access to and how to bridge the two software runtime environments. 

Supporting systems

A complete monitoring solution requires monitoring both core and supporting components. Monitoring the application code on the device is an example of whitebox monitoring, where you’re interested in how the application is functioning. You probably also want to include some blackbox monitoring. For example, your monitoring software can probe APIs and other cloud services that your solution depends on. When you’re trying to respond to a problem, having these blackbox probes in place can lead to much faster resolution. 

Alerting

Alerting is about getting warnings or notifications, and helps draw your attention to important conditions. These in turn often lead you to check visualisations and often the associated log information.

A problem with alerting is that humans are good at learning to ignore annoying “noise” (think of traffic noise, repetitive emails, and so on). Alerts are only valuable if they can be responded to and then appropriately dismissed. If an alert reports an issue that can’t be addressed, the information in the alert should instead be another metric or visualisation.

Source:

https://cloud.google.com/solutions/remote-monitoring-and-alerting-for-iot
https://cloud.google.com/solutions/iot-overview#operational_information
https://prometheus.io/docs/visualization/grafana/