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  • Blog

    Return JSON from Azure Functions with Python

    I was working on an Azure Function for an open source wildlife IoT project and came across a lack of documentation in docs.microsoft.com. I had successfully returned HTTP content from my Azure function, but wasn’t sure how to get it to return JSON so I could interpret it elsewhere. In this case I’m storing latitute (lat)…

    Nathan Lasnoski
  • Blog

    The CMDB Solves Yesterday’s Problems… the Cloud is Different

    I spent many years building CMDBs for companies. The promise was that if we could just get the configuration information into a centralized database we’d be able to better plan, build, and run IT by understanding the landscape of applications and how they work. We had a relatively slow moving technology picture, with the complexity…

    Nathan Lasnoski
  • Blog

    FRS to DFS-R SYSVOL Upgrade

    What is the SYSVOL? In simple terms, Active Directory’s SYSVOL exists on every Domain Controller in your domain. It contains your network’s synchronized public files that clients access. The default location is C:\Windows\SYSVOL but it can be placed anywhere during the Domain Controller Promotion (DCPromo) process. FRS vs DFS-R FRS is the legacy file replication…

    Concurrency, Inc.
  • Blog

    ServiceNow: Configure Multi-SSO IDP against Multiple Azure Active Directories

    ServiceNow offers Single Sign-On plugin functionality for your organization to leverage a different authority for authenticating into the platform. Most organizations typically find that they only have one identity provider to authenticate against, but a recent customer of ours is a service provider that manages multiple identity providers for their customers. Note that this blog post…

    Michael Dugan
  • Blog

    Microsoft VSS Backup Retryable Error

    What was going on? One of our customers reported an issue with how an Exchange server was backing up. The backups themselves were working alright, and the customer was able to perform test restores. However, one of the VSS writers was consistently showing an error state. You can check the status of all available VSS…

    Concurrency
  • Blog

    ServiceNow Order Guides – Cascading Variables

    What is an Order Guide?  Straight from the docs site: An order guide submits a single service catalog request that generates several items. Order guides allow you to define rules that identify which catalog items to include in a request.  This can be extremely useful in the (obvious) use case of user onboarding.  You also are…

    Concurrency
  • Blog

    ServiceNow Flow Designer: Kick the code to the curb with easy-to-read rich process automation!

    On the marketplace today are countless product suites that enable powerful automation capabilities. But, how many of those product suites can give the user a simple, easy-to-use designer to create those powerful workflows? Probably not many, but ServiceNow has delivered something to make all our lives easier. That’s right – I’m talking about Flow Designer within the…

    Michael Dugan
  • Blog

    Cloud Modernization’s Impact on Organizational Structure

    The movement to the cloud is driving not only workload transformation but team transformation as well. A common question I’m asked is “how does the move to the cloud change my IT org structure?” The movement to the cloud is only one of the factors impacting the change of the IT org structure, while it is also…

    Nathan Lasnoski
  • Blog

    Resize a SQL Server Transaction Log File Using PowerShell

    This is the second in a series of posts on using the DBATools suite of PowerShell functions to administer SQL Server environments.  In my first post, I showed how to restore an Availability Group database.  In this post, I demonstrate how to use the DBATools functions to resize a transaction log file and reduce the number…

    Concurrency, Inc.