Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 2023

Rules backfilling via vmalert

Recording rules is a clever concept introduced by Prometheus for storing results of query expressions in a form of a new time series. It is similar to materialized view and helps to speed up queries by using data pre-computed in advance instead of doing all the hard work on query time. Like materialized views, recording rules are extremely useful when user knows exactly what needs to be pre-computed. For example, a complex panel on Grafana dashboard or SLO objective.

Monitoring the Universe & Beyond: Our 2022 in Review

Share: When we posted our first ever Momentum blog about a year ago detailing our 2021 achievements, we were just weeks away from Russia’s renewed attack of Ukraine. While the war isn’t won yet and we’re approaching the one year anniversary of the attack, it’s heartening to see how much has changed around the world and that almost everyone now knows the expression: Slava Ukraini! So if we had to choose one word to best describe 2022 it might be: Resilience.

The business value of frequent deployments

We’ve written a ton of content about how to unlock the value of frequent deployments for your database as well as applications, from improved coding patterns to strategies for architecting smaller deployments. But the multi-million-dollar question for you and your business is something else entirely: what is the real business value of frequent deployments? That’s the question I’m going to address in this series of three posts.

SQL Server Timestamps: A Detailed Introduction

Accurate data is one of the most important aspects of any organizational function. It helps in decision-making and planning, and for most businesses, it also helps in generating revenue. The data can be anything from a list of clients and products to an inventory list. Nothing comes close to SQL timestamps regarding data accuracy, timeliness, and management. SQL Server timestamp is a critical component of relational databases, but they aren’t used on a daily basis by most database professionals.

How do your DevOps plans really measure up?

Digital transformation seems to be on the to-do list of every organization at the moment. Alongside it, DevOps is one of those buzzwords that gets lumped in, with some vague intention of having things automated. If you’re championing a DevOps implementation in your organization, or wish to see where your current processes measure up against your peers, read on.

Monitoring AWS DynamoDB performance and latency

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service provided by AWS and is tailor-made for serverless applications. As a fully managed service, we don’t have to worry about operational tasks with DynamoDB, such as hardware provisioning, configuring instances, scaling, replications, software patching, etc.

NiCE Oracle Management Pack 5.3 released

Oracle is a highly performant and reliable multi-model database management system running online transaction processing, data warehousing, and mixed database workloads. Although Oracle environments are reliable and performant, monitoring dedicated Oracle on-premise or cloud deployments is crucial to safeguard business continuity.

Monitoring benchmark: how to generate 100 million samples/s of production-like data

Share: One of the latest benchmarks we did was for OSMC 2022 talk VictoriaMetrics: scaling to 100 million metrics per second - see the video and slides. While the fact that VictoriaMetrics can handle data ingestion rate at 100 million samples per second for one billion of active time series is newsworthy on its own, the benchmark tool used to generate that kind of load is usually overlooked. This blog post explains the challenges of scaling the prometheus-benchmark tool for generating such a load.

MongoDB Pricing Explained: A 2023 Guide To MongoDB Costs

MongoDB is a popular non-relational database among developers of distributed apps. This Not Only SQL (NoSQL) database system delivers versatility, high scalability, and a flexible querying model. MongoDB is also remarkable for its fault-tolerance, self-healing, and real-time analytics capabilities. But many companies also decry that MongoDB pricing is expensive and complicated. We’ll share how the MongoDB pricing model works.

Maximizing Value with Database Testing

The foundation of software development is rooted in the handling and preservation of data in compliance with the goals of the application. The core of any software program is the information stored in databases that is used for retrieval and manipulation. To ensure that the chosen database system (whether SQL or Non-SQL) is suitable for the needs of the application, it’s important to conduct tests to evaluate its capabilities.

What Databases Taught Me About Scaling Observability

I recently attended a virtual event and heard the speaker comment, “Relational databases don’t scale.” To my ears, this is about as silly a statement as saying, “No one can eat 26 hot dogs in 12 minutes” right before Kobayashi shows up and eats 50. In my experience, relational databases scale when they’re placed in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. Just imagine if Kobayashi was your data architect!

The ten habits for highly successful compliant database DevOps

Database DevOps has come of age. Now seen as a key technical practice which can contribute to the successful implementation of DevOps, it stops the database being a bottleneck and makes releases faster and easier. Conversely, perhaps, the automation and audit trails it introduces can help to protect personal data within databases and make compliance part of the same process rather than an additional time-consuming step outside it.

Latest updates about backup components of VictoriaMetrics

VictoriaMetrics is proud to announce that we consider vmbackup and vmbackupmanager to be feature-complete solutions as of release 1.85.3. These backup components are essential for ensuring the safety and integrity of your data, and we have made a number of improvements in recent releases to make them even more reliable and user-friendly.

What Is a Column Database and When Should You Use One?

If you are working with large amounts of data that will primarily be used for analytics, a column database might be a good option. There are a lot of different options when it comes to choosing a database for your application. A common discussion seems to be the high-level SQL vs. NoSQL database argument of whether data should be stored in a relational database or in a NoSQL alternative like key-value, document or graph databases.