Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

February 2021

12 Best Docker Container Monitoring Tools

Monitoring systems help DevOps teams detect and solve performance issues faster. With Docker and Kubernetes steadily on the rise, it’s important to get container monitoring and log management right from the start. This is no easy feat. Monitoring Docker containers is very complex. Developing a strategy and building an appropriate monitoring system is not simple at all.

Troubleshooting services on Google Kubernetes Engine by example

Applications fail. Containers crash. It’s a fact of life that SRE and DevOps teams know all too well. To help navigate life’s hiccups, we’ve previously shared how to debug applications running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). We’ve also updated the GKE dashboard with new easier-to-use troubleshooting flows. Today, we go one step further and show you how you can use these flows to quickly find and resolve issues in your applications and infrastructure.

With SRE, failing to plan is planning to fail

People sometimes think that implementing Site Reliability Engineering (or DevOps for that matter) will magically make everything better. Just sprinkle a little bit of SRE fairy dust on your organization and your services will be more reliable, more profitable, and your IT, product and engineering teams will be happy. It’s easy to see why people think this way. Some of the world’s most reliable and scalable services run with the help of an SRE team, Google being the prime example.

Will Azure Blob Storage Rule the Unstructured Data Storage Space?

2020 was indeed challenging for Kovai.co still had great learning! One of them is what I am sharing with the community through this blog. For enterprises like us, worldwide work from anywhere became the new reality. We had to move towards a cloud-native world where secure data storage and effective remote management of IT infrastructure were of supreme importance.

Finance: Why Getting Answers From Engineering About Your AWS Bill Is So Difficult

It’s no secret that AWS bills are confusing. But it’s particularly difficult for the team who actually writes the check to Amazon for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars — yet has never personally seen what the inside of the AWS portal looks like (and probably never will).

The Best Software Deployment Tools For 2021

Software deployment tools allow developers to ensure that software is properly installed with it’s required packages and implementation steps conducted in the correct order. Using these tools is a vital requirement for any business that creates its own software in-house. There is a variety of software that can assist developers in launching their latest code with new ones (such as GitHub Actions) arriving to the forefront of many growing consideration lists.

Announcing Updated Analytics Filters to Dive Even Deeper into your Historic Incident Data

After successfully implementing a conditional evaluation engine into Runbooks, we started looking at other places in FireHydrant that would be improved with this engine. After hearing a lot of feedback from you, we’ve implemented conditions into our Analytics page. Let’s dive in and see what new things are possible with this new filtering.

Product Updates: Creating a New Runbook Just Got Easier with Templates

Starting out with runbooks can be daunting, we've built a way to implement our best practices into a runbook that can be implemented in a single click. On top of this, there's now even more ways to attach runbooks to your incidents and a much easier way to test out the runbook that you're currently working on.

Build Trust with a Custom Domain

Security in software is now everyone’s problem. We can no longer simply rely on InfoSec teams or your equivalent Gary “he-likes-security” to handle security-related processes and issues. All software, tools, infrastructure, and services need to be trusted. It is important to us at Cloudsmith to provide you with the ability to build that trust within your teams or with your customers. Cloudsmith allows you to use your own domain name for your repositories.

What is virtualisation? The basics

Virtualisation plays a huge role in almost all of today’s fastest-growing software-based industries. It is the foundation for most cloud computing, the go-to methodology for cross-platform development, and has made its way all the way to ‘the edge’; the eponymous IoT. This article is the first in a series where we explain what virtualisation is and how it works. Here, we start with the broad strokes.

How DevOps Practices Strengthen Security & Compliance?

Companies worldwide these days make use of DevOps with a view to attain better profit and progress. Despite its increased use, DevOps can lead to higher risks if not properly handled. There should be an integration of security and development process form the beginning in order to have a risk-free progress. The entire organization will be at risk if proper security check is not practiced in each stage, as cyberattacks are increasing each day.

Troubleshoot problems using GitLab activity data with the new plugin for Grafana

GitLab is one of the most popular web-based DevOps life-cycle tools in the world, used by millions as a Git-repository manager and for issue tracking, continuous integration, and deployment purposes. Today, we’re pleased to announce the first beta release of the GitLab data source plugin, which is intended to help users find interesting insights from their GitLab activity data.

Coralogix - On-Demand Webinar: Drive DevOps with Machine Learning

DevOps has become the de facto method of developing and maintaining software, but it comes with its own challenges. Keeping track of change in a complex, fluid environment is a serious hurdle to overcome. In this webinar, we explained how machine learning can be employed within a DevOps team to improve operational performance, optimize mean time to recovery and create a better service for your customers.

Introduction to the ImGui C++ Library with Conan

The Conan team provides an introduction and demonstration for the open-source C++ graphics library known as ImGui. To show the basics of ImGui, we will create a simple application with some controls like buttons, scrollbars, color editors, and more. We will show how easily and quickly you can create a graphical user interface using this library. Finally, we will show how to a simple way to build ImGui using packages with Conan, the package manager for C and C++.

Only Autonomous Anomaly Detection Scales

Say you’re looking for a smart product to detect anomalies in your organization’s IT environment. A sales rep drops by and shows you all kinds of great artificial intelligence (AI) features with fancy-sounding algorithms. It sounds very impressive and seems like there is a lot of very valuable AI in the product. But, in fact, the opposite is true. This is a manual AI product wrapped in a deceiving jacket. Let me tell you more.

Microservices Asynchronous Communication and Messaging | JFrog Xray

Microservices have changed the way we build applications. Software design has moved from large monolithic applications (which are not really adaptable to changes and improvements) to a collection of small, independent processes infrastructure which is far more suited to adapt to changes in today’s agile world.

Is Your Cloud Cost Report Missing Critical Information?

Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021, with the cloud projected to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020, according to Gartner. Enterprises are, therefore, rightly concerned about controlling their public cloud costs—to ensure they’re getting all the value they’re paying for.

What is MEC ? The telco edge.

MEC, as ETSI defines it, stands for Multi-access Edge Computing and is sometimes referred to as Mobile edge computing. MEC is a solution that gives content providers and software developers cloud-computing capabilities which are close to the end users. This micro cloud deployed in the edge of mobile operators’ networks has ultra low latency and high bandwidth which enables new types of applications and business use cases.

DFI and Canonical offer risk-free system updates and reduced software lead times for the IoT ecosystem

Feb. 25, 2021 – DFI and Canonical signed the Ubuntu IoT Hardware Certification Partner Program. DFI is the world’s first industrial computer manufacturer to join the program aimed at offering Ubuntu-certified IoT hardware ready for the over-the-air software update. The online update mechanism of and the authorized DFI online application store combines with DFI’s products’ application flexibility, to reduce software and hardware development time to deploy new services.

AIOps for Managed Service Providers: modernize and monetize your monitoring offering

Legacy monitoring tools weren’t built for visibility into the cloud and can obstruct your ability to compete and grow your business. Interlink Software works with MSPs to define, monetize and deliver AIOps monitoring solutions that meet the requirement for high-performing business services and hybrid cloud infrastructures that digital enterprises rely on.

Announcing Support for GKE Autopilot

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is the preferred way to run Kubernetes on Google Cloud as it removes the operational overhead of managing the control plane. Earlier today, Google Cloud announced the general availability of GKE Autopilot, which manages your cluster’s entire infrastructure—both the control plane and worker nodes—so that you can spend more time building your applications.

Why Monitoring Should be a Part of Your DevOps Strategy

DevOps came about as a result of ever-growing lags between development and operation. It’s a framework that deals with communication bottlenecks, allowing for smooth change management. DevOps monitoring is a crucial element and a necessity for this framework to succeed. Monitoring plays a vital role in realizing the underlying goals of DevOps. DevOps is all about eliminating technical inefficiencies and improving the speed of the whole cycle from development to deployment.

Enhance your secrets management strategy with Puppet + HashiCorp Vault

Security is paramount in today's digital world. Bad actors can use sensitive data to wreak havoc across thousands of machines in minutes if organizations do not have a solid cybersecurity strategy. Compliance requirements and regulations are increasingly calling for key management and strong encryption as part of a business's cybersecurity strategy. These are no longer optional but mandatory security requirements as DevOps also gains in popularity for agile development and application deployment.

Tanzu Tuesdays - Modern Application Configuration in Tanzu with Craig Walls

Historically, application configuration has been managed internal to an application deployment, in environment variables, or in files placed in the filesystem of the running application. As applications evolved into microservices, however, that approach become inadequate. Centralized configuration, including application-specific and shared configuration, versioning and rollback capabilities, and auditing became necessary. As more applications and microservices are becoming containerized and deployed in Kubernetes, configuration continues to be challenging. While Kubernetes offers configuration via ConfigMaps and Secrets, there’s no clear way to manage the properties going into those resources. In this Tanzu Tuesday session, we’ll explore the Tanzu Configuration Service, a means of managing configuration in a Kubernetes-native way using ConfigMaps, but that also offers the benefits afforded in a centralized configuration option.

How to get your first green build on CircleCI

In this video we'll help you set up your first CircleCI build, run your first CircleCI build, break that build, use workflows to build our configuration file, and then advance workflows by fanning in and fanning out. We’ll then be adding some changes to use workspaces. And finally, we will conclude this learning activity by SSH’ing into your build.

Is my CI pipeline vulnerable?

Your continuous integration (CI) pipelines are at the core of the change management process for your applications. When set up correctly, the CI pipeline can automate many manual tasks to ensure that your application and the environments it runs in are consistent and repeatable. This pipeline can be an integral part of your security strategy if you use it to scan applications, containers, and infrastructure configuration for vulnerabilities.

The path to production: how and where to segregate test environments

Bringing a new tool into an organization is no small task. Adopting a CI/CD tool, or any other tool should follow a period of research, analysis and alignment within your organization. In my last post, I explained how the precursor to any successful tool adoption is about people: alignment on purpose, getting some “before” metrics to support your assessment, and setting expectations appropriately.

Using the CircleCI API to build a deployment summary dashboard

The CircleCI API provides a gateway for developers to retrieve detailed information about their pipelines, projects, and workflows, including which users are triggering the pipelines. This gives developers great control over their CI/CD process by supplying endpoints that can be called to fetch information and trigger processes remotely from the user’s applications or automation systems.

Kaptain Is Aboard: v. 1.0 Is GA!

AI and Machine Learning (ML) are key priorities for enterprises, with a recent survey showing that 72% of CIOs expect to be heavy or moderate users of the technology. Unfortunately, other research has found that the vast majority—87%—of AI projects never make it into production. And even those that do often take 90 days or more to get there. Why this disconnect between intent and outcome? What are the roadblocks to enterprise ML? And what can be done about them?

Product Update: Netreo On-prem Version 12.2.26 and Netreo SaaS Upgrade

With the recent release of Netreo On-prem v12.2.26, your premiere solution for full-stack IT management and AIOps is even better! Your latest release includes powerful new features and enhancements that simplify IT management with a single source of truth about the status of your entire infrastructure.

Use Datadog geomaps to visualize your app data by location

Being able to track and aggregate data by region is important when monitoring your application. It can provide visibility into where errors and latency might be occurring, where security threats might be originating, and more. Now, you can use Datadog geomaps to visualize data on a color-coded world map. This helps you understand geographic patterns at a glance, including where users are experiencing outages, app revenue by country, or if a surge in requests is coming from one particular location.

Single-Tenant Cloud vs Multi-Tenant Cloud

In this article, we shall talk about the advantages and disadvantages of single-tenant cloud and multi-tenant cloud. So let us get started! In the past decade adoption of cloud computing has been off the charts. For a long time most companies (primarily enterprises) managed their own IT infrastructure and they could reap the benefits of isolation, privacy and greater management control. This is what is known as a single tenant cloud architecture i.e.

Introduction to Azure Service Bus | Serverless360

We are back with a discussion on Azure Service Bus, the most popular messaging service from Microsoft Azure. In this video, we throw light on the Queues and Topics, along with guidance on choosing the right service for your business scenario. Also, discover the significance of topic subscription rules using Serverless360.

Accelerating support to Microsoft Azure Serverless resources | Serverless360 #webinar

Discover how Serverless360 could efficiently complement the Azure portal in managing and Monitoring all your Azure resources under one roof. Also, our experts will provide solutions to mitigate the challenges in supporting your Azure applications. This video elaborates on how to achieve Proactive Monitoring, Holistic Application View & End-to-End tracking to accelerate support to Azure Serverless Services which eventually reduces the Total Cost of Ownership.

Overview of Incident Lifecycle in SRE

Incidents that disrupt services are unavoidable. But every breakdown is an opportunity to learn & improve. Our latest blog is a deep dive into best practices to follow across the lifecycle of an incident, helping teams build a sustainable and reliable product - the SRE way As the saying goes, “Every problem we face is a blessing in disguise”.

Applying the Roles and Profiles Method to Compliance Code

Most of you are familiar with the roles and profiles method of writing and classifying Puppet code. However, the roles and profiles method doesn’t have to exist only in your control repository. In fact, as I’ve been developing Puppet code centered around compliance, I’ve found that adapting the roles and profiles method into a design pattern to Puppet modules makes the code more auditable, reusable, and maintainable!

Run private cloud and on-premises jobs with CircleCI runner

CircleCI has released a new feature called CircleCI runner. The runner feature augments and extends the CircleCI platform capabilities and enables developers to diversify their build/workload environments. Diversifying build environments satisfies some of the specific edge cases mentioned in our CircleCI runner announcement.

VMware Spring Cloud Gateway for Kubernetes, the Distributed API Gateway Developers Love, Is Now GA

For all the talk of digital transformation, there’s one workflow that tends to hinder release velocity: changes to API routing rules. But while—much to the consternation of enterprise developers everywhere—this process has historically remained stubbornly ticket-based, Spring Cloud Gateway removes this bottleneck. The open source project provides a developer-friendly way to route, secure, and monitor API requests.

All You Need To Know About Cloud Interconnection

Many enterprises today have a range of assets residing in a mixture of both public and private clouds. As a result, there is a need to connect not just site-to-cloud but also cloud-to-cloud - use cases we would term Data Centre Interconnection (DCI) and Cloud Interconnection.

Webinar - Step Up Your DevOps Game with 4 Key Integrations for Jira & Bitbucket

Atlassian’s Ian Buchanan discusses how to integrate third-party DevOps tools with Atlassian’s robust DevOps ecosystem. You’ll learn about the benefits of an integrated tool stack, an introductions to 4 key DevOps practices, and examples of how those practices can integrate with Jira and/or Bitbucket.

QA Engineers, This is How SRE will Transform your Role

When implementing SRE, almost every role within your IT organization will change. One of the biggest transformations will be in your Quality Assurance teams. A common misconception is that SRE “replaces” QA. People believe SLOs and other SRE best practices render the traditional role of QA engineering obsolete, as testing and quality shift left in the SDLC. This leads to QA teams resisting SRE adoption.

Bringing value to our members through automation using Ocean by Spot

Moving to Kubernetes gives applications the ability to scale, but it also introduces challenges to managing and operating cloud infrastructure. When giffgaff, a virtual mobile network, migrated to EKS, they needed to figure out how they would automatically scale their EC2 instances and how they would do so cost-efficiently. In this session, you’ll hear how giffgaff worked with Spot by NetApp to implement container-driven autoscaling for provisioning compute capacity and leverage spot instances to save big on their cloud bill.

Maximize your Google Cloud Investment with LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor’s agentless architecture is designed for organizations adopting hybrid and multi-cloud environments to scale with ease. With an end-to-end view across important GCP services, IT Operations teams are equipped with real-time visibility into the health and performance of their entire distributed environments, maximizing value for GCP investments whether fully deployed or just getting started with cloud migration.

The next Big Thing in Azure Database Monitoring Landscape

Today’s applications are expected to be highly responsive and always online. Such circumstances excite the pressure on applications to respond in real-time to large changes in usage at peak hours, store ever-increasing volumes of data and make it available in milliseconds. Azure Database Services comes to rescue in such situations, and Azure supports many industry-standard databases and APIs.

Feature Spotlight: Golden Signals

As a team we have spent many years troubleshooting performance problems in production systems. Applications have gotten so complex you need a standard methodology to understand performance. Fortunately right now there are a couple of common frameworks we can borrow from: Despite using different acronyms and terms, they fortunately are all different ways of describing the same thing.

The True Cost of IT Failures (and What to Do Instead)

In this age of digital transformation, any issues with your IT infrastructure can cause major disruptions to your business. On top of this, IT environments that support critical business applications continue to get more complex and dynamic. As failures, outages, and incidents increase in volume and cost, the risk of an outage within your company becomes a very expensive one.

AI Chihuahua! Part II

With build-or-buy decisions, it often comes down to an all-in-one platform or a mixture of best-of-breed technologies. With open-source technology companies can actually get the best of everything. So, why not roll your own platform based on top-notch technologies? The real question is whether enterprises can afford to. Open-source software is free to use, but teams have to invest quite a bit in selecting, introducing, using, and maintaining these technologies.

Building and running FIPS containers on Ubuntu Pro FIPS

Canonical provides customers Ubuntu Pro images AWS Marketplace. Ubuntu Pro for AWS is a premium AMI designed by Canonical to provide additional coverage for production environments running in the cloud. It includes security and compliance services, enabled by default, in a form suitable for small to large-scale Linux enterprise operations — with no contract needed.

Customizing Containers during App Modernization using CloudHedge

CloudHedge Transform provides the user with the option of modifying the data that goes into the container. It uses the data gathered from the X-Ray, a part of the CloudHedge Discover module that has been performed on the process. Using the Transform Platform, the user can currently: The Edit Dockerfile feature can be used to: And the File Selection feature can be used to.

Surveying the Tides of Cloud-Native & Open Source Observability

We can plausibly say the enterprise development market turned the tide on cloud-native development in 2020, as most net-new software and serious overhaul projects started moving toward microservices architectures, with Kubernetes as the preferred platform.

Hosted Prometheus vs. Hosted Graphite

In this article, we will discuss major features, differences, and similarities of the open-source monitoring tools known as Prometheus and Graphite. We will then dive into how you can benefit from MetricFire’s hosted Prometheus and Graphite. Lastly, we will explain why, given the choice, hosted Graphite could be a better monitoring option for you. MetricFire provides comprehensive monitoring solutions with Hosted Prometheus and Hosted Graphite.

How to reduce your AWS bill up to 60%

Let’s face it. Once you have consumed your free credit, AWS costs an arm and a leg. This is the price to pay for high-quality services. But how can you reduce your costs without sacrificing quality? This post will show you how to reduce your bill by up to 60% by combining four built-in features in Qovery. There are three categories of costs on AWS. The “data transfer”, the “compute”, and the “storage” costs.

Making CI/CD work with serverless

“Serverless computing is a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application.” — “Serverless Computing”, Wikipedia This mundane description of serverless is perhaps an understatement of one of the major shifts in recent years.

Azure Cost Optimization: 10 Ways to Save on Azure

Cloud has become an integral part of modern businesses as extra resources keep moving towards it. Budgeting cloud expenses has come into focus with its massive expenditure in IT. Azure usage optimization entails several modes through which an organization can save on costs. Let's look into ten ways to save on Azure.

Introducing the Datadog quick nav menu

Datadog’s features give you full visibility into every part of your application environment, so it’s likely you have many resources to switch between as part of your troubleshooting and development workflows. For example, you might switch from the host map to investigate a performance issue with your services in APM, or jump between dashboards to correlate metrics and troubleshoot a problem with your CI/CD pipeline.

Taloflow raises new funding and joins Y Combinator W21 Batch

We're excited to share some updates on what we've been working on at Taloflow. We've come a long way since we launched Tim - AWS cost management for developers, which was a finalist for Product Hunt Dev Tool of the Year. Since launch, we've had the opportunity to work with nearly 100 companies and developers. We've helped digital native companies like NS1, Bluecore and Modusbox save money, improve performance, and get a better grasp of their marginal costs on the cloud.

Dispelling 7 SLA Myths That Keep Your DevOps Awake at Night

DevOps fits this odd niche between development and oversight. Like any “Wild West” type of position, pretty much anything goes. Your job is to think of everything including the stuff you haven’t thought of yet. You make the rules, and as long as the lights are on you’re considered a success. But alongside that freedom come the rumors and SLA myths that inspire such dread that you write them off as jokes.

SQL Server deployments: Which Redgate tools should you use?

Since 1999, we’ve been developing tools at Redgate to support database deployments for SQL Server. In the past couple of years, we’ve increased our effort in this space by further developing our proprietary technologies based on SQL Compare, and acquiring others like Flyway, the most popular database migration engine. As a result, we now offer tools which provide more options for SQL Server and also support deployments for 20 different database systems.

Logging with the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller

The HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller publishes two sets of logs: the ingress controller logs and the HAProxy access logs. After you install the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller, logging jumps to mind as one of the first features to configure. Logs will tell you whether the controller has started up correctly and which version of the controller you’re running, and they will assist in pinpointing any user experience issues.

Surviving the disaster: How to identify bugs immediately & get back on track w/ Codefresh & Rookout

Deploying through imperative kubectl commands is error-prone and time-consuming. In this webinar, we show you how to automate deployments to your Kubernetes cluster through Codefresh. Codefresh has several features to manage Kubernetes deployments, including the Kubernetes Environment Dashboard and the GitOps Dashboard.

Rancher Online Meetup - Feb 2020 - Longhorn 1.1 and Rancher

Join Rancher and SUSE at our next global meetup where we focus on the latest release from of CNCF Sandbox project Longhorn and its benefits for Rancher users. When used with Rancher, Longhorn 1.1 provides Kubernetes users with a reliable Kubernetes-native persistent storage solution from core to cloud to edge. This meetup will be hosted by Adrian Goins (Director of Community, SUSE). You will also hear directly from Sheng Yang (Principal Developer, Longhorn) and William Jimenez (Product Manager, Longhorn).

Gartner's 2021 Strategic Roadmap for ITOps Monitoring highlights

Does your work involve a lot of ITOps Monitoring? If so, chances are you have developed a roadmap for 2021 that addresses digital business disruption, application and infrastructure changes, and the ongoing global pandemic… And here’s an opportunity to incorporate expert advice into your plan.

How Do You Measure Technical Debt? (and What To Do About It)

Technical debt is an important — but often unclear — concept for engineering teams. In software development, technical debt, also called code debt or tech debt, is defined as the cost of refactoring a piece of code or system to keep it working efficiently. It can be caused by outdated architecture, a change in requirements, or the result of choosing an easier solution instead of a better, but more difficult one.

AI Chihuahua! Part I: Why Machine Learning is Dogged by Failure and Delays

AI is everywhere. Except in many enterprises. Going from a prototype to production is perilous when it comes to machine learning: most initiatives fail, and for the few models that are ever deployed, it takes many months to do so. While AI has the potential to transform and boost businesses, the reality for many companies is that machine learning only ever drips red ink on the balance sheet.

The State of Robotics - January 2021

A new start? 2020 came and went, and in the process, it left a mark in history and our lives that won’t be erased. Together, as a community, we all struggled, we all faced new challenges, we all united and did our best to help each other. We are grateful for the effort of our nurses, doctors, carers, scientific, essential workers, and innovators that have led this fight. We also take a moment to remember those that we have lost and those who have been affected the most.

Monitor Core Web Vitals with Datadog RUM and Synthetic Monitoring

In May 2020, Google introduced Core Web Vitals, a set of three metrics that serve as the gold standard for monitoring a site’s UX performance. These metrics, which focus on load performance, interactivity, and visual stability, simplify UX metric collection by signaling which frontend performance indicators matter the most.

JFrog CLI Plugin: build-report

JFrog CLI Plugins allow enhancing the functionality of JFrog CLI to meet the specific user and organization needs. All public plugins are registered in JFrog CLI's Plugins Registry. The source code of a plugin is maintained as an open source Go project on GitHub. Anyone can develop their own plugin, in Go. This build-report plugin can print a table showing a report of a build that was published to Artifactory, right into your terminal. Watch this video to see how.

Buying on AWS Reserved Instance Marketplace

While buying AWS Savings Plans and reserved instances can potentially reduce EC2 costs by up to 70%, the 1- or 3-year commitment required to achieve these savings can sometimes end up wasting more money than if you had stayed with on-demand pricing. In this article we will explore why AWS commitments can be tricky and how buying shorter-terms RIs on the Amazon Reserved Instance Marketplace can be done successfully.

5 DevOps best practices to reinforce with monitoring tools

As part of a modern software development team, you’re asked to do a lot. You’re supposed to build faster, release more frequently, crush bugs, and integrate testing suites along the way. You’re supposed to implement and practice a strong DevOps culture, read entire novels about SRE best practices, go agile, or add a bunch of Scrum ceremonies to everyone’s calendar.

7 Things DBAs Should Do Before Going On Holiday

Thanks to 2020, many of us don't remember the last time we took a holiday or vacation. If you were able to get away from the office, kudos to you. Hopefully, 2021 will be kinder to us, and we can take some time to recharge. Whether you're a veteran DBA standing watch over million-dollar, mission-critical database systems or a jack-of-all-trades who maintains your organization's SQL Servers, Windows Servers, and all the other corporate IT assets, everyone deserves to take a relaxing holiday.

Our Relentless Roll: D2iQ Konvoy 1.7 and D2iQ Kommander 1.3 are GA!

The latest versions of Konvoy and Kommander are now generally available: the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP) continues on its relentless roll. DKP is the leading independent Kubernetes platform for enterprise grade production at scale and Konvoy and Kommander are the reason why. You can learn more about Konvoy here, Kommander here, and our general approach here.

A Stunning Cloud Mistake Too Many Companies Are Making

Cloud migration is, more often than not, treated as a one-way street where organizations migrate applications and workloads from on-premises to a public cloud, or less often, from one public cloud to another. But a key finding in our recent State of Hybrid Cloud survey of 350 IT professionals with cloud decision influence/authority is that a whopping 72% of participating organizations stated that they’ve had to move applications back on-premises after migrating them to the public cloud.

Use associated template variables to refine your dashboards

Datadog dashboards provide a foundation for monitoring and troubleshooting your infrastructure and applications, and template variables allow you to focus your dashboards on a particular subset of hosts, containers, or services based on tags or facets. We’re pleased to announce template variable associated values, which can help you speed up your troubleshooting by dynamically presenting the most relevant values for your template variables.

Monitor Red Hat Gluster Storage with Datadog

Red Hat Gluster Storage is a distributed file system, built on GlusterFS and operated by Red Hat for Linux environments. With its focus on scalability, low cost, and deployment flexibility across physical, virtual, and cloud-based environments, organizations use Gluster Storage in a variety of high-scale, unstructured data storage applications.

Getting Started as an SRE? Here are 3 Things You Need to Know.

We live in the era of reliability. The most important feature for a service is how dependable it is in the eyes of a user. Companies are hiring with this in mind. In a 2019 LinkedIn article, site reliability engineers were listed as the 2nd most promising career in the United States. But how do you get started as an SRE? In this blog post, we’ll look at: SRE is a multifaceted role. You will contribute to an organization's code base, policy, culture, and more.

GitHub vs GitLab

Version Control also known as Source Control, is the process of tracking and managing the changes in software. Version control software keeps track of code changes and helps development team to analyze their work, identify each change set separately, point to a change using the version number and much more. Source Control is a defacto standard right now for any development and successful deployment of your code.

Virtualization Monitoring: Answers You Were Looking For

Virtualization monitoring can ensure your virtualized infrastructure is performing at its best capacity. The chances of issues on the part of the physical server escaping your sight are quite high, as several virtual machines (VM) are sharing resources. This is why it’s important to understand everything there is to virtualization and virtualization monitoring.

To the cloud and beyond! Planning a multi-year data center migration

A data center migration into the cloud is often a daunting business initiative that can take years as you transition your existing hardware, software, networking, and operations into a brand new environment. In our roles with Google Cloud’s Professional Services organization, we work side by side with customers to collaboratively architect and enable data center migrations into Google Cloud. Over the years, we’ve participated in multiple migration journeys, and devised a general approach.

Cloud Analyzer's Saved Reports Deliver Optimized Reporting

As Spot by NetApp’s Cloud Analyzer usage grows, customer feedback is continuously being incorporated and added as new features and functionality. Recently, we have been adding to Cloud Analyzer’s spend analysis features, enabling more filters and options for conducting focused drill-down into spend data.

Puppet's new Scaling DevOps Service helps orgs scale DevOps practices

I’m really pleased to announce Puppet’s new Scaling DevOps Service, a pop-up consultancy inside Puppet designed to advise businesses on how to automate, streamline, and scale DevOps practices. This service was established as a result of conversations with dozens of customers who all stagnated in their DevOps evolution and turned to us for advice on how to scale that wall.

The Modern Monitoring Mullet: Business Intelligence in the Front, Machine Learning Party in the Back

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term mullet was "apparently coined, and certainly popularized, by U.S. hip-hop group the Beastie Boys," who used "mullet" and "mullet head" as epithets in their 1994 song "Mullet Head." But the term "mullet head" also appears in the 1967 film "Cool Hand Luke." And the term "mullet head" was also used by Mark Twain in his novel "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," first published in 1885.

Seven Tips to Evaluate and Choose the Right DevSecOps Solutions

Demand for DevSecOps products has been growing strongly, as more companies realize the importance of integrating security into their DevOps pipelines. However, IT and DevOps pros who dive into the DevSecOps market looking for options quickly realize that the number of DevSecOps tools and frameworks is vast and confusing.

GitHub vs JFrog: Who Can do the Job for DevOps?

When you choose a product, you’re hiring it to do a job. You’ve put out the“Help Wanted” sign for DevOps, and choosing between two well-qualified prospects is high stakes. The hire you make can ensure the enterprise swiftly rises — or sinks. With JFrog and GitHub, you have two of the best candidates. Now judge which is the best fit. Beyond the puzzle of competing features, which one knows how best to get the job done?

Automate DAST in DevSecOps With JFrog and NeuraLegion

NeuraLegion’s VP Oliver Moradov takes us through how you can use JFrog and NeuraLegion to automate AppSec testing in your pipelines. The days of long release cycles are well and truly behind us — it is simply not feasible in our agile development world, with developers delivering software and more features at an unprecedented scale and speed. With DevOps, we have multiple development teams running multiple concurrent builds, which is great, but security testing has not kept up.

Kubernetes at Scale on the Public Cloud: Q&A with Forrester Research

Today’s enterprises are pushing forward with their digital transformation initiatives to meet customer and market demand. The latest CNCF survey reports that 91% of companies are running Kubernetes and 81% of those companies are running Kubernetes in production. That’s up from 58% in 2018, and the numbers continue to ramp up quickly. There’s several approaches to how enterprises are thinking about adoption and their deployment and management of Kubernetes. I sat down with Lauren E.

AWS Lambda Container Image Support Tutorial

This is an example machine learning image recognition stack using AWS Lambda Container Images. Lambda container images can include more source assets than traditional ZIP packages (10 GB vs 250 MB image sizes), allowing for larger ML models to be used. This example contains an AWS Lambda function that uses the Open Images Dataset TensorFlow model to detect objects in an image.

How To Track Apache Server Performance

Tracking Apache server performance is important to avoid future problems. Hence, what is Apache? Apache is one of the most popular and widely used web servers. As an open source cross platform HTTP server, it can be run in a Linux, Unix, or Windows environment. Stable modular Apache architecture can be configured for multiple needs and it’s crucial to provide seamless and efficient server functionality.

Architecting Database Dev and Test Environments: Best Practices and Anti-Patterns for SQL Server

Many organizations use out-of-date architecture patterns for developing relational databases which are a pain to manage, slow developers down, and limit testing and innovation. It’s time to modernize these environments and improve standards for database development. In the years I worked as a consultant specializing in SQL Server administration and tuning, I frequently fielded questions from customers about how to best manage databases in development and test environments.

4 Things you Need to Know about Writing Better Production Readiness Checklists

When we think of reliability tools, we may overlook the humble checklist. While tools like SLOs represent the cutting edge of SRE, checklists have been recommended in many industries such as surgery and aviation for almost a century. But checklists owe this long and widespread adoption to their usefulness. Checklists can also help limit errors when deploying code to production. In this blog post, we’ll cover: Production checklists should be holistic.

Circonus Partners with Cloudbakers to Help Companies Monitor and Optimize Their Google Cloud Infrastructure

We’re excited to share today that we’ve partnered with Cloudbakers, a Google Cloud Premium Partner, in an exclusive partnership in which Cloudbakers will serve as the Google Cloud Platform reseller for Circonus, and Circonus will serve as the exclusive provider of GCP monitoring and analytics to Cloudbakers’ customers.

Graphite Dropping Metrics: MetricFire can Help!

Sometimes a seemingly well-configured and fully-functional monitoring system can malfunction and lose metrics. Subsequently, you get a distorted picture of what is happening with the monitoring object. In this article, we will look at the possible causes of Graphite dropping metrics and how to avoid it. MetricFire specializes in monitoring systems. You can use our product with minimal configuration to gain in-depth insight into your environments.

Automated browser tests EXPLAINED in code

Automated tests keep your code flowing, but don't stress about testing browsers. This video shows how browser tests are automated in real world through Selenium, Chrome, and Python code examples, with a bonus tip to help debugging in your Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline. The code and diagram graphics are generated via the Python library Code Video Generator, source in the links below.

How Puppet Supports DevOps Workflows in the Windows Ecosystem

For Windows teams that adopt a DevOps approach, augmenting their native toolset (GPO, SCCM, PowerShell) can offer reliable and repeatable processes that successfully affect change. This quick overview highlights how Puppet Enterprise can complement existing Windows tools for better visibility and transparency across the automation processes.

Online CNCF event: Why you should use NATS for your next Cloud native application

When building Cloud applications, we often put significant effort into breaking down our monoliths into small code pieces. They are easier to maintain but hard to make them communicate together. This is where NATS comes in. NATS is a simple and highly performant messaging system for Cloud-native apps. In this talk, I will share my experience using NATS at Qovery, why you should or should not use it, and the difference between the well-known RabbitMQ and Kafka.

Syncing our Jira Tickets to our Designs

Are you a designer within a software company? How do you manage your tasks and collaborate on those with your team? At Codefresh we use Jira for managing all our R&D and design tasks. This post provides an overview on how we manage design related tasks in Figma and ensure the issues are visible within Figma through the use of components. If you are new to components, have a look at our previous blog post on how we use components in our Design System.

JFrog Pipelines for Shippable Customers

JFrog’s acquisition of Shippable completed the JFrog Platform by providing a CI/CD orchestration layer in the form of JFrog Pipelines. During the last two years following the acquisition, we continued to provide access to the Shippable service to avoid any operational disruption for our customers. JFrog Pipelines has matured to a point at which we can now recommend it as a destination for Shippable customers. Consolidating our efforts to a single product gives us the focus we need to bring you more innovation faster.

What is fault injection?

When reading about Chaos Engineering, you’ll likely hear the terms “fault injection” or “failure injection.” As the name suggests, fault injection is a technique for deliberately introducing stress or failure into a system in order to see how the system responds. But what exactly does this mean, and how does this relate to Chaos Engineering?

How to Implement Effective DevOps Change Management

A decade ago, DevOps teams were slow, lumbering behemoths with little automation and lots of manual review processes. As explained in the 2020 State of DevOps Report, new software releases were rare but required all hands on deck. Now, DevOps teams embrace Agile workflows and automation. They release often, with relatively few changes. High-quality DevOps change management is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must. For a lot of DevOps teams, this is easier said than done.

ZiniosEdge- The Digital Service Innovation Company in AR/VR/MR, AI/ML, Cloud, and Digital Apps.

SourceEdge, founded in 2004, has been a strong solution engineering company with specialisation on Microsoft technologies and platforms. Treaded on a decade plus IT Outsourcing and Software Development experience, developing both custom software solutions and implementation of packaged software, SourceEdge pioneered delivering cost-effective, hi-tech, and digital solutions to SMBs and Enterprise customers globally.

Top 3 approaches to monitor the health status of Azure Event Hubs

Over the past few years, Microsoft Azure has seen tremendous growth, and many new enhancements have improved user productivity. To keep users well informed about their resource status and availability, Microsoft has also been actively working on various monitoring capabilities.

Planning an IT Automation Project

The planning of an IT automation project is crucial to success, this article takes a deep dive into areas which should be considered and addressed before embarking on an automation journey. Securing executive sponsorship and establishing governance Having the support and guidance from a senior leader within your organisation will undoubtedly benefit the delivery of your project. Implementing automation is change, and as with any change; has the potential for resistance.

FlashDrive Startups Program

We give entrepreneurs from around the world the opportunity to build their projects with FlashDrive, and we're grateful to be able to give back to the startup community all the help we received when we launched FlashDrive not so long ago. FlashDrive Startups Program is a free program designed for startups at various stages that provides free computational credit and dedicated support to help startups quickly get started with FlashDrive's infrastructure, innovate, and grow rapidly.

Using HAProxy as an API Gateway, Part 4 [Metrics]

HAProxy publishes more than 100 metrics about the traffic flowing through it. When you use HAProxy as an API gateway, these give you insight into how clients are accessing your APIs. Several metrics come to mind as particularly useful, since they can help you determine whether you’re meeting your service-level objectives and can detect issues with your services early on. Let’s discuss several that might come in handy.

All Developers Need Is a Browser - How to be more productive by having less

What would you say if I told you that you can be as productive with the cheapest laptop as with the one you already have? Would you believe me if I said that there is no need for you to install an IDE, compilers, CLIs, Docker, and whatever else you might have on your laptop? How about having a full development environment created whenever you need it instead of dealing with Virtual Machines and whatever else might be fulfilling your development needs?

A quick guide to reputational risk

When it comes to reputational risk, a reactive approach is generally taken by organizations, with efforts focused on handling threats to their business they are already aware of. As much as this enables short term damage limitation, it may not be enough to manage and protect your risk in the long term. Instead, a more proactive approach is key to success.

How CloudZero Built an Engineering Culture of Cost Autonomy

As a cloud cost intelligence company, we often like to say “every line of code is a buying decision”. If you’re running on AWS or one of the other big cloud providers, you know that a simple decision about how to architect an application can have a significant impact on your future cost of goods sold (COGS). However, in my experience, many engineering teams don’t discuss cost — at least not until it’s already become a problem.

Chaos Engineering, Explained

Chaos engineering has definitely become more popular in the decade or so since Netflix introduced it to the world via its Chaos Monkey service, but it’s far from ubiquitous. However, that will almost certainly change over time as more organizations become familiar with its core concepts, adopt application patterns and infrastructure that can tolerate failure, and understand that an investment in reliability today could save millions of dollars tomorrow.

Security vs. Compliance: What's the difference?

The first two posts in our compliance blog series focused on managing compliance through automation. In this third post, we take a step back to explore a more foundational — but no less important — topic: What’s the difference between compliance and security? Is compliant infrastructure secure infrastructure? People often talk about compliance and security as though they’re one and the same.

Your Software Is Secure Until It's Not: An Informal And Unscripted Chat On DevSecOps

Join JFrog’s Kat Cosgrove, as she interviews Melissa Mckay, Developer Advocate, JFrog and Seth Vargo, Senior Staff Engineer at Google Cloud - for an interactive discussion about how to thrive with DevSecOps in a world of security threats and breaches. Listen in as they discuss the recent SolarWinds hack, which affected many high-profile Fortune 500 companies and large U.S. federal government agencies. They will also look at how you can overcome the stress, fear and paranoia of releasing something that you think could result in disaster, with some sound experience and knowledge.

Continuous Optimization in AWS CodePipeline using CloudFormation

For those of you who aren’t familiar with AWS CodePipeline, it’s a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) framework that enables application development teams to deliver code updates more frequently and reliably. You may have also heard it being called a CI/CD or DevOps pipeline. These pipelines have always traditionally been used to deploy the components of a certain application whenever new code in “checked-in”.

A Day in the Life: Intelligent Observability at Work with DevOps

Thursday morning, and I’ve done some yoga, a ten-minute meditation and am at my desk in my hastily thrown up garden office with a mug of green tea by 08:30am. I’m really not missing the commute to our old HQ (now permanently closed, thanks to the pandemic) in the heart of Seattle and am enjoying an extra few minutes in bed and getting mindful before logging in.

Can AI help redefine the future of finserv?

The last few years has been a time of major disruption in the Finserv sector. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has emerged as an important tool for providers of financial products and services to deliver more personalised and more sophisticated services to customers faster. The financial services sector is at the beginning of an exciting journey with AI – a journey that we believe will spark a revolution and redefine financial services.

How to keep your Linux disk usage nice and tidy and save space

Everyone loves a clean, tidy home (hopefully). This also includes your other home – slash home, the Linux home directory. Disk cleanup and management utilities are extremely popular in Windows, but not so much in Linux. This means that users who want to do a bit of housekeeping in their distro may not necessarily have a quick, convenient way to figure out how to get rid of the extra cruft they have accumulated over the years. Let us walk you through the processing of slimming down your home.

Automate Assessment and Analysis of Apps for Modernization

Thank you for reading my last blog on how to modernize age-old applications using automation. Let’s take a closer look at the available automated tools and explore the insights they extract to speed up app modernization. Assessment and Analysis The automation tool for application assessment should: There are free tools provided by cloud service providers, however, they focus more on infra (VMs and Bare Metal) and don’t focus on applications and databases (aspects mentioned above).

Using Puppet to detect the SolarWinds Orion compromise

SolarWinds' widely-used Orion IT platform has been the subject of a supply-chain compromise by an unidentified threat actor. The attack was discovered in December 2020, but it appears to have begun in March 2020 when the attacker used trojan malware to open a backdoor on SolarWinds customers around the world.

Using Google Container Registry To Invoke Codefresh Pipelines

If you are using a CI/CD tool, you likely are already familiar with workflows. Generally, workflows are a set of tasks, activities or processes that happen within a specific order. Within Codefresh, a popular workflow is to trigger Codefresh pipelines from Docker image push events. This moves the workflow forward from Continuous Integration to Continuous Deployment. Images can be promoted from one environment to the other through a variety of ways.

Enterprise DevOps: 5 Keys to Success with DevOps at Scale

After getting a taste of DevOps’ benefits, enterprises naturally seek to widen its adoption. However, the tooling and processes that work for small-scale use cases often fall short when teams try to scale DevOps efforts. You must support all your different teams, toolsets, applications, processes, workflows, release cycles and pipelines — both legacy and cloud native.

How I Manage Credentials in Python Using AWS Secrets Manager

A platform-agnostic way of accessing credentials in Python. Even though AWS enables fine-grained access control via IAM roles, sometimes in our scripts we need to use credentials to external resources, not related to AWS, such as API keys, database credentials, or passwords of any kind. There are a myriad of ways of handling such sensitive data. In this article, I’ll show you an incredibly simple and effective way to manage that using AWS and Python.

Accelerate Your Container Adoption with VMware Tanzu Build Service 1.1

Building containers securely, reliably, and consistently at scale is a daunting task. Yet, it’s an imperative for organizations embracing the rapid delivery of high-quality software. This is the scenario addressed by VMware Tanzu Build Service, which can help any enterprise IT group build and update containers automatically. And it’s flexible enough to slot right into any incumbent CI/CD toolchain.

What is Chaos Engineering and How to Implement It

Chaos Engineering is one of the hottest new approaches in DevOps. Netflix first pioneered it back in 2008, and since then it’s been adopted by thousands of companies, from the biggest names in tech to small software companies. In our age of highly distributed cloud-based systems, Chaos Engineering promotes resilient system architectures by applying scientific principles. In this article, I’ll explain exactly what Chaos Engineering is and how you can make it work for your team.

4 Tips on Preparing for a [Great] Failure

The most essential lesson of SRE is that failure is inevitable. This shouldn’t be a cause for despair. SRE shows how embracing failure is empowering. By celebrating failure, you can accelerate development and foster a culture of learning. Rather than hoping to prevent failure, SRE prepares you to respond well to it. It can be difficult, if not impossible, to anticipate where failure will occur in complex systems given unknown unknowns.

What's new in Puppet 7 Platform

Hello, Puppet friends! It’s been a few months since we rolled out the latest major version of the Puppet platform, bumping PuppetDB, Puppet Server and Puppet Agent to “7.0.0.” First, we’d like to extend our gratitude to our vibrant Puppet community, who helped us immensely in locating and fixing some annoying bugs that managed to sneak through the release. We promptly provided follow-up releases, so be sure to check out the latest available versions for your operating system.

Grafana - How to read Graphite Metrics

Before getting started on how to read Graphite metrics, let us first dive into understanding what Grafana is all about. In a nutshell, Grafana is an open source analytics and monitoring solution, developed and supported by Grafana Labs. It allows you to query, display graphs and set alerts on your time-series metrics no matter where the data is stored.

What is YAML?

YAML is a serialization language that was created in 2001, although it would take another few years before it became super popular. The acronym originally referred to Yet Another Markup Language but this was changed a few years later to YAML Ain’t Markup Language, to emphasize that developers should use it for storing data, instead of creating documents (like HTML or Markdown, for example).

Comparison: Code Analysis Tools

Code analysis tools are essential to gain an overview and understanding of the quality of your code. This post is going to cover the following While these tools target similar use cases, they differ in their implementation, ease of use, and documentation just to name a few. This post provides an overview of each tool as well as a detailed comparison to help analyse and decide which tool is best suited for your needs.

Do Edge Applications Need Stateful Storage?

Kubernetes applications are increasingly making their way to the edge and embedded computing. Storage will quickly follow as the applications that rely on this edge infrastructure become more advanced and naturally carry more state. According to a study by McKinsey and Company, a “connected car” processes up to 25GB of data per hour.

Cloud Native CI/CD: The Ultimate Checklist

Choosing a software solution means checking the right boxes, and being “cloud native” has bubbled to the top of most lists. But cloud native is a box built of boxes of its own. For a CI/CD solution like JFrog Pipelines, cloud native starts by being “born in the cloud” to natively execute in, build for, test in, and deploy to cloud computing environments. But what boxes does a CI/CD solution really need to tick to complete that larger cloud native box?

Should You Build Your Own Cloud Cost Optimization Tool? 3 Questions To Ask Yourself

This is a follow up to a blog series where we explore DIY cloud cost management, monitoring, and optimization tools. In the first, we investigated how Lyft, Netflix, Segment, Expedia, and Slack built theirs. Check it out here. “Build versus buy” is the eternal question for every engineering and DevOps team setting out to solve a technical problem. In the cloud cost monitoring and optimization world, both options can take on many forms.

Benefits of containers for enterprises

Within just five years, Kubernetes and containers have redefined how software is deployed. Researchers expect the container market to grow by 30% year over year to become a 5 billion industry by 2022. But what is the reason behind this mass adoption of container technology in the enterprise? Download whitepaper Containers are more resource efficient than virtual machines or other legacy app architectures.

How to Modernize Applications using Automation

Automation and adoption of cloud (public and/or private) are the two key components for the success of Digital Transformation. Automation has been synonymous with the agility and scalability of applications and infrastructure. DevOps ensures quick release of apps all the way from development to test to the stage to production. Cloud ensures quick allocation of resources (Compute, Memory, Storage, Network, etc.) for the applications.

Observability vs. Monitoring in DevOps

If you strip the buzzwords and TLAs from the definition of DevOps? You’ll find that the roles and tasks involved aim mostly for more uptime and less downtime in the SDLC (software development lifecycle). The first step to achieving that is becoming aware of downtime as it happens with the help of monitoring solutions. Only then can you respond and resolve the issue in a timely manner that minimizes the dreaded and expensive downtime of software development teams.

Delivering Container Security in Complex Kubernetes Environments

You may have noticed the VMware Tanzu team talking and writing a lot about container security lately, which is no accident. As DevOps and Kubernetes adoption continue their exponential growth in the enterprise, securing container workloads consistently is among the most difficult challenges associated with that transformation. There is a term we have been seeing—and using—a lot lately that encompasses a new way of looking at container security for Kubernetes: DevSecOps.

Communication Tool Down? Here are 3 Ways to Handle it

January 4th, 2021, the communication service Slack suffered a major outage. Teams working remotely found their primary communication method unavailable. The incident lasted over 4 hours, during which some customers had intermittent or delayed service, and others had no service at all. It was a reminder that even the most established tools are susceptible to downtime. This is a core lesson of SRE: that failure is inevitable.

5 Different Monitoring Challenges Companies are Successfully Tackling Using Circonus

At Circonus, we love hearing (and sharing) how our customers are using our platform to tackle their monitoring challenges. It’s not because we want to congratulate ourselves. Rather, it reminds us that we have to continue listening to the pains that organizations — customers and non-customers alike — are having, so we can continue to enhance our platform with the capabilities they need. This is the approach we have taken since we built Circonus.

What is MEF 3.0 and why it matters

You may have spotted some news last week from PCCW Global that both its international network and the Console Connect digital platform have recently received MEF 3.0 certification. Besides demonstrating to our customers and partners that Console Connect is aligned with the latest and highest network standards, this news also highlights the work that we are doing behind-the-scenes to help advance network automation and on-demand services globally. Read more…

What is Codefresh? Platform Overview

Brandon provides a high-level overview of the #Codefresh, The #1 #GitOps automation platform for #Kubernetes apps. TIMESTAMPS 00:00 - What is Codefresh? 00:26 - Key Integrations 01:06 - Codefresh Pipelines 01:28 - Live pipeline debugging 01:44 - Pipeline composition 01:50 - Open-source steps library, custom steps, and freestyle steps 02:20 - Conditional logic, variables, and breakpoints 02:43 - Trigger capabilities 03:15 - Granular control over concurrency 03:40 - DevOps dashboards & traceability 04:19 - Helm deployments and release boards 04:32 - GitOps support & ArgoCD Integration

New year, New York, new CivoStack

When we first started our managed Kubernetes beta, we knew utilising K3s as the Kubernetes distribution of choice was the right move. Not only is it light-weight and quick to deploy, K3s has features ideally suited for the scenarios we envisioned our users would encounter. It’s important for us to make sure any service we offer is 100% compatible with industry standards, and K3s allows us to do just that but with simplicity and speed for our users.

To Build a Production App Platform with Kubernetes, Focus on Developer Experience

To get developers to adopt Kubernetes, it's important to keep in mind that it's not about Kubernetes! It's about the developer experience we create on top of it. At VMware Tanzu, we believe that success with platforms like Kubernetes is found at the intersection of applications and infrastructure, focusing on creating a great developer experience and enabling platform teams in modern practices that will help them be successful on Day 2.

How to get a phone call when your API fails

Learn how you can get a phone call alert when your API fails. Spike.sh sends you alerts via phone call, SMS message, email and Slack when you have any issues in production. Spike.sh integrates with your infrastructure, performance monitoring, error tracking, uptime monitoring, API monitoring and cron job monitoring tools. Our integrations include AWS, Google Cloud, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic and many more.

How to get a phone call when your cron job fails

Learn how you can get a phone call alert when your cron job fails. Spike.sh sends you alerts via phone call, SMS message, email and Slack when you have any issues in production. Spike.sh integrates with your infrastructure, performance monitoring, error tracking, uptime monitoring, API monitoring and cron job monitoring tools. Our integrations include AWS, Google Cloud, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic and many more.

7 Reasons Why Serverless Encourages Useful Engineering Practices

Serverless provides benefits far beyond the ease of management…it strongly encourages “useful” engineering practices. Here’s how. It’s hard to determine what can be considered a “good” or “bad” engineering practice. We often hear about best practices, but everything really boils down to a specific use case. Therefore, I deliberately chose the word “useful” rather than “good” in the title.

Talking Shipa - "What's New in 1.2?"

Shipa is excited to launch our new webcast series, Talking Shipa. To kick this series off, we sat down with Shipa Founder and CEO, Bruno Andrade, to discuss the release of Shipa Application Management Framework for Kubernetes, version 1.2. In this video, Bruno spends a few minutes with us to talk about the new features and improvements that are packed into this new release.

Hybrid cloud - everything you need to know

Hybrid cloud allows businesses to optimise their costs associated with cloud infrastructure maintenance. It also brings many other benefits, such as business continuity, compliance, better scalability and improved agility. According to the Forrester Wave: Hybrid Cloud Management, Q4 2020, hybrid cloud is an essential technology that every modern organisation is looking for and its adoption is only expected to grow in the following years.

Using the Cloud Monitoring Dashboard Editor

Want to visualize your monitoring data like never before? In this episode of Stack Doctor, we show you how to use the new Dashboard Editor to easily visualize your Cloud Monitoring data. Specifically, we’ll show you how to create a dashboard using gauges, scorecards, and text widgets and how you can utilize the new layouts and chart configuration modes to closely monitor the health of your services!

Operationalizing Kubernetes

Organizations have now seen the value of building microservices. They are delivering applications as discrete functional parts, each of which can be delivered as a container or service and managed separately. But for every application, there are more parts to manage than ever before, especially at scale, and that’s where many turn to an orchestrator for help.

Effective CI/CD with Github and the JFrog Platform

Are you using GitHub for your SCM and as the starting point of your delivery process? Join this webinar to learn advanced tips and tricks for simplifying and accelerating your CI/CD pipelines with the JFrog Platform on top of GitHub. Sharing a detailed demo of a real-world release pipeline triggered from GitHub, we’ll review best practices and hard-won lessons for how you can streamline your end-to-end process and ensure it meets the security and quality requirements of large-scale enterprise delivery.

Rancher Online Meetup: January 2021 - k3d: Local Development with K3s Made Easy

In this meetup we'll show you how to get productive developing locally on Kubernetes with the help of k3d which lets you spin up a K3s cluster on your laptop. We'll guide you through a full development setup including the k3d CLI, the awesome new vscode-k3d plugin and synergy with tools like Skaffold or Tilt.

Why is Network Topology Important for Your Business?

With more and more businesses depending on technology, networking can get more and more complex. Therefore, a network topology plan, which gives you a clear oversight of what’s at stake, will always be useful. But what are the benefits of having a topology system in place? How can it help a business with its performance management in real-time? There are a variety of network monitoring tools out there that practice a topological approach to support.

Four Tips for Selecting a Data Center Monitoring System

Data centers are some of the most critical pieces of infrastructure on the planet. Without them, many of the biggest companies would not be able to operate as they do. That’s why it is so crucial to make sure you are keeping a close eye on your data center’s performance. Data centers and server rooms are, according to some sources, getting smaller. Cloud computing, too, is moving things off-site. However, that doesn’t make them any less critical.

The 4 Types of Cloud Environments and How They Differ

Up to 90% of businesses are now using cloud computing to some extent. These companies are also conducting up to 60% of their work via the cloud. This data clearly shows us that cloud environments are, at last, in the mainstream. However, there is still some confusion over the different types of cloud environment. While it is easy to assume that one cloud ‘fits all,’ different types serve differing purposes.

What Are the Benefits of Network Monitoring for Your Business?

In the modern age, all businesses rely on technology. Any company based in an office will depend on networking, too. But how can you be sure that your network is working hard enough for you? No matter the size or shape of your business, it pays to be careful. Without some form of monitoring solution, you, your team, and your revenue are at the mercy of your technology. For many companies, managed network monitoring solutions are essential. It is an industry that is worth $207 billion worldwide.

Your Guide to the Best Network Monitoring Tools

Monitoring your network is essential if you want to make sure you are protecting your productivity. However, knowing where to start is a challenge. That’s why there are multiple network monitoring tools available. But how do you necessarily know which are likely to work best for you? In this guide, we will look at some of the most popular network monitoring software available. We will also consider what each model does to help support network management in real-time.

What is Network Management?

Anyone with an office in the modern age will depend on a network of some kind. Whether you are a small enterprise or a larger company, you’re likely dependent on technology. But what happens when something goes wrong with that network? Do you know how to keep track of its different components and areas? Corporate networking can be complicated. However, managing it properly is vital to make sure that you are hitting your KPIs.

Portainer recommends MicroK8s for effortless deployment

Portainer is an open source tool that allows for container deployment and management without the need to write code. In their recent publication, ‘How to deploy Portainer on MicroK8s’, the Portainer team share with the community how easy and fast it is to deploy Portainer on MicroK8s. In fact, the entire process only requires a single command! For a step-by-step walkthrough of the process, take a look at Portainer’s 5 minute video below. Install MicroK8s

Monitoring as code: what it is and why you need it

“Everything as code” has become the status quo among leading organizations adopting DevOps and SRE practices, and yet, monitoring and observability have lagged behind the advancements made in application and infrastructure delivery. The term “monitoring as code” isn’t new by any means, but incorporating monitoring automation as part of an infrastructure as code (IaC) initiative is not the same as a complete end-to-end solution for monitoring as code.

The Complete Guide to Microservices

Microservices, also known as microservices architecture, refers to a method of designing and developing software systems. Microservice architecture is becoming increasingly popular as developers create larger and more advanced apps. The goal is to help enterprises become more Agile, especially as they adopt a culture of continuous testing. Here are the basic features of microservices.

Operators and Service Providers' Lucrative 5G First-Mover Opportunity

The next-generation of mobile connectivity is rapidly bringing supercharged mobile gaming, Internet of Things technology, and a smarter, better-connected world to consumers’ fingertips. As 5G rapidly evolves and brings new possibilities, it presents a wealth of opportunities for mobile network operators (MNOs) to differentiate their services with high performance applications; and for wireline operators to deliver differentiated backhaul transport services, but they need to act quickly.

Pipelines CI/CD Completes Cloud DevOps on Azure

For a complete JFrog DevOps SaaS solution hosted on Azure, the puzzle is now complete. JFrog DevOps Pipelines CI/CD is now available for all JFrog Cloud plan levels hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud service. With Pipelines automation, now all the key elements of the JFrog DevOps Platform can be hosted on Azure as a SaaS subscription. That includes the Artifactory universal binary repository manager, and Xray software component analysis.

Data Center Monitoring for Peak Performance: Challenges and Solutions

When it comes to data centers, what is ‘peak performance’? Is it a case of using a data center monitoring system so that it works to full capacity? Or, is it more a case of maximizing its potential? Data centers are complex but integral, which is why, for the average business, achieving the best results can be difficult. Challenges for data center operations will differ from firm to firm.

Machine Learning Applications for Data Center Management

The data center is a remarkably complex structure. However, they are crucial to the everyday running of even the smallest businesses and enterprises. Whether in-house, cloud, or hybrid, the average data center management requires specialist knowledge and meticulous oversight for max efficiency. That is one reason, at least, why machine learning is emerging as an ideal partner for centers of the future.

The unattainable promised land of tool consolidation

It’s on the agenda of almost every CIO, COO and CFO, and sounds like a great idea in general: tool rationalization, often trying to standardize on top of a single vendor. It can reduce costs and provide a streamlined IT Ops process through data consistency, a single pane of glass and a single source of action.

5 Things You Need To Understand To Be Successful in the Cloud

Last week my colleague, Clay Ryder, and I presented a webinar, titled No! The cloud is not someone else’s data center, in which we examined how companies can reduce the complexity of a cloud migration and accelerate the benefits of digital transformation. It’s an important topic, so as a follow-up to the session, I’ve summarized five key things you need to understand to be successful in the cloud. If you missed the session, you can listen to the full discussion at the link above.

Welcome To The Show - The Bintray Replacement

It’s finally happened. After months of whispers, JFrog have announced the sunsetting date for Bintray - their distribution add-on to their long-standing on-premises Artifactory product. It’s officially shutting down on May 1, 2021. Cloudsmith is a direct replacement for Bintray. And Artifactory. And their X-Ray product. Don’t get us wrong - JFrog has achieved a lot over the years and we would never publicly speak out against them.

Facter 4: back to the roots

Facter is a cross platform system profiling tool. It gathers nuggets of information about a system such as its hostname, IP address and operating system. We call these nuggets of information facts and they are used by other Puppet products like Puppet, Puppet Server and Bolt to make decisions in their automation process. You can extend Facter by writing custom facts or external facts and use them in Puppet manifests.

LogicTalks: Meeting the Moment and Needs of LM Customers

In this mash-up of previously recorded LogicTalks hear how LogicMonitor meets the moment and needs of our clients. Whether you're migrating to the cloud, looking to reduce the sprawl of monitoring tools, expedite onboarding of new endpoints, or wanting to leverage AIOps features like dynamic thresholds and predictive forecasting, learn how LogicMonitor looks to partner with our clients to drive digital transformation and give you visibility into every corner of your diverse infrastructure.

Introduction to StatsD

StatsD is an industry-standard technology stack for monitoring applications and instrumenting any piece of software to deliver custom metrics. The StatsD architecture is based on delivering the metrics via UDP packets from any application to a central statsD server. Although the original StatsD server was written in Node.js, there are many implementations today, with Netdata being one of them.

Enterprise CXO Priorities for 2021

One of the reasons we selected Sierra Ventures as one of our seed investors is because of their CXO Advisory Board. They have dozens of knowledgeable advisors across a wide variety of verticals: Healthcare, Consumer, Retail, Finance, Technology, Media and Telecom. Each year they conduct a broad survey of major trends. This kind of survey data is gold for Enterprise-focused startups.

Removing the Chaos Between Monitoring and Incident Management

The monitoring and incident management process is often chaotic and time-consuming for organizations. However, there is a better way to approach IT incidents and make your existing process function better. Topology and relationship-based observability solutions take the incident management process from chaotic to structured. Let’s look into how StackState’s solution improves and speeds up the incident resolution process.

Into the Sunset on May 1st: Bintray, JCenter, GoCenter, and ChartCenter

JFrog is making some important changes that will impact users of Bintray, JCenter (part of Bintray), GoCenter, and ChartCenter. Bintray has provided the open source community a free, universal cloud platform for publishing and distributing binaries. Bintray helped JFrog support the Java community as the host of the JCenter repository for Java OSS libraries, packages and components. We launched GoCenter and ChartCenter to extend similar services to the Go and cloud-native communities.

Cloud Suitability Analyzer: Scan and Score Your Apps' Cloud Readiness for Faster Migration

Migrating to the cloud is a significant, complicated endeavor, one that requires a realistic migration plan for any application portfolios that will be mapped out first. To get started, a detailed technical analysis of each application's cloud readiness helps determine the best cloud migration approach and strategy to take. If this sounds like a daunting process, that’s because it often is! Let's understand why.

"I'm Just Doing my Job," An SRE Myth

"Sorry, but I'm just doing my job." I heard this recently from a customer service representative. What they were saying made sense (afterall, we don’t have total control over our work environments), but it felt wrong. As a customer, I was left dissatisfied with our interaction. However, the representative assured me that they were simply following protocol. This got me thinking: can established practices and protocols sometimes get in the way of excellent customer experience?

How to set AWS S3 Write Permissions with Relay

Misconfigured resources are a big contributor to compromised cloud security. If you have misconfigured Amazon S3 buckets, for example, malicious actors could access your data, then inappropriately or illegally distribute this private information, putting your company’s security at risk. Policies and regular best practices enforcement are key to reducing this security risk.

Using the SQL Change Automation PowerShell cmdlets with Jenkins

In this video you’ll get an overview of how Redgate’s SQL Change Automation PowerShell module can plug into Jenkins using pipeline-as-code to build and deploy your SQL Server Databases. For more information, feel free to email in, leave a comment below or visit the Redgate website!

RampChat: IT Leadership In 2021 | Mark Settle | CIO Talk

Most IT groups received praise in 2020 for enabling business operations to continue throughout the Covid crisis. What will it take to be successful in 2021? Seven-time CIO Mark Settle shares his perspective on leadership challenges and opportunities in the coming year, using insights from our fall Operations survey.

Stay Alert to Security With Xray and PagerDuty

When it comes to securing your software development against open source vulnerabilities, the earlier action occurs — by the right person — the safer you and your enterprise will be. Many IT departments rely on the PagerDuty incident response platform to improve visibility and agility across the organization.

Automatically debug and test CI/CD Pipeline with Dashbird

In this article, we will build a CI/CD pipeline with the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) and debug a test it using Dashbird’s observability tool. In 2021, continuous integration and continuous delivery, or short CI/CD, should be part of every modern software development process. It helps deliver new features and bug fixes much faster.

Ubuntu Core 20 secures Linux for IoT

2nd February 2021: Canonical’s Ubuntu Core 20, a minimal, containerised version of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for IoT devices and embedded systems, is now generally available. This major version bolsters device security with secure boot, full disk encryption, and secure device recovery. Ubuntu Core builds on the Ubuntu application ecosystem to create ultra-secure smart things. “Every connected device needs guaranteed platform security and an app store” said Mark Shuttleworth.

Securing SQL Server with DoD STIGs

Making sure your SQL Servers are secured against malicious users is difficult. How can you know that you’ve done enough? How do you know you’re protected from the things that actually worry you? The United States Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) publishes a set of guidelines for organizations securing different pieces of software that connect to the US Department of Defense’s networks (DoD).

Redgate commits to the future of PASS

When PASS announced in December last year that it was ceasing all operations from January 16, 2021, it came as a surprise to many people. For 21 years, it’s represented a global community of over 300,000 data professionals who use the Microsoft data platform. From the PASS Summit to online learning, SQLSaturdays to opportunities to network, its’s been a permanent fixture throughout the year.

Challenges of a cloud native Spark application

Big data applications require distributed systems to process, store and analyze the massive amounts of information that companies are collecting. Apache Spark has become a go-to framework for this, powering use cases from AI and machine learning to data analysis, by providing a unified interface for distributing data processing tasks across a cluster of machines. Spark requires other services to manage the cluster, with YARN and Mesos as two well-known cluster management tools.

How to export logs from Google Cloud Logging to BigQuery

Welcome to the Google Cloud Video Learning Series, where we show you how to use Google Cloud services. In this episode, we’ll show you how to export logs from Google Cloud Logging to BigQuery. Customers often export logs to BigQuery to run analytics against the metrics extracted from the logs. BigQuery can help identify unauthorized changes in configuration and inappropriate access to data, thus meeting your organization’s security and analytics requirements.

How I Leaped Forward My Jenkins Build with JFrog Pipelines

Jenkins is the most popular open source CI tool on the market today. Being an early entry into the marketplace, Jenkins popularized CI. Like other CI tools Jenkins empowers developers to automatically build, integrate, and test code as soon as they commit it to the source repository. This allows developers to catch bugs quickly and ultimately deploy much faster.

Private home directories for Ubuntu 21.04

Ubuntu has evolved a lot since its early beginnings as an easier-to-use derivative of Debian that catered primarily to the nascent Linux desktop market. Today Ubuntu is deployed beyond just your laptops at home and in the office. Nowadays you are more likely to find Ubuntu in the cloud, powering some of the world’s best known enterprises and running on various IoT devices out in the field.