Visualize DevSecOps & ITSM events with light signals

 

Motivation

A light signal is a way to draw the attention of a team in their workspaces to business-important events from technical systems.

This provides another alternative to dashboard monitors and email or chat notifications to keep employees and team informed. Light frequency is also used to indirectly create employee sensitivity to the frequency of specific events occurring.

 

Operational scenarios

For which deployment scenarios is the use of light signals helpful for teams and employees? That depends very much on the task area, of course. We have listed a few examples for which we use light signals internally:

Changes

With Versio.io can inventory (document) the entire IT landscape of a company. Here we can be informed for specific, business-critical changes through light signals:

• Configuration changes that affect availability or security.
• New creation of users or assignment of administrative permissions.
• New creation of paid cloud resources.

IT governance

With Versio.io, we verify every detected change based on customer-specific rule sets. The detected violations can be business-critical and should be identified promptly by the employees and the team. Exciting events for us are:

• Expiring SSL/TLS certificates.
• Insecure SSH access configurations.
• Products with known security vulnerabilities.

Network communication

With Versio.io we inventory the communication of host processes (applications) in the network. Here, after the transient phase, we want to be informed that ...

• a new, previously unannounced communications or
• an unwanted or unauthorized communication is taking place.

Marketing

And now an example from a seemingly non-technical area at first glance. With Versio.io we inventory website visits. Marketing would like to get a timely sense of whether marketing actions are being embraced by users. Here, we use light signals to indicate marketing colleagues:

• Website visitors coming through a specific channel (Google, email campaign, partner page, Instagram, etc.).
• Returning website visitors.
• Website visitors who are doing specific things on the website.

 

Implement it with Versio.io & Luxafor

As a signaling device, we use Luxafor Flag. Why? Easy installation and simple to control via the Luxafor Webhook from the Versio.io platform. You can simply connect your Luxafor Flag device via USB to your computer and install the Luxafor software. Here you will also find your Luxafor device specific web-hook ID.

In Versio.io you only have to set up your Luxafor credentials and an appropriate alerting. That's it!

Image: Example configuration of an event alerting in Versio.io

 

Best practices

In the context of our internal use of light signals at Versio.io, we have gained some experience for their use, which we are happy to share with you:

• IT employees love the light signals as a gamifying gadget.
• The frequency of the light signals, and thus events, should be considered: Too short - it no longer provides information and users find it annoying. Too long - users forget the meaning of the color and cannot interpret the event correctly.
• Light signals should exclusively be used for work-critical events. Otherwise, they become irrelevant.
• Light signals on group or employee specific Luxafor devices should be filtered in Versio.io so that only events belonging to the team or employee's area of responsibility are signaled.

And now get to work. Build your own light signal event notification!

 

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Keywords

Event

 

Visualization

 

Notification

 

Light signal

 

DevSecOps

 

DevOps

 

ITMS

 

Teams

 

Employee