When you plan monitoring strategies, the first thing you need to consider is the characteristics of the target systems. Depending on the resources you want to monitor, you will have to apply different architectural designs such as data collection, metrics generation, visualization, refresh schedule, and more. When you want to monitor network systems, making these considerations will allow you to achieve the right monitoring solutions.

Deep diving into the 'Normal accident' theory by Charles Perrow, and what it means for SREs.

On September 1, 2023, Microsoft’s Defender for Azure Blob Storage is set to introduce a groundbreaking feature: Malware Scanning. This highly-anticipated addition to the Defender suite brings real-time protection against malicious content, making it a vital component in fortifying your data security and safeguarding against the ever-evolving threat landscape.

Today, the cloud impacts all departments of the organization, not just the IT crew. Here’s how cloud centers of excellence drive cloud success.

For many businesses, especially large enterprises, contact centers are a key contributor to revenue and customer satisfaction. While “omni-channel” (voice, chat, email, social) is how many if not most contact centers operate, calls are the still the most critical element of their communications.

Feature management is an emerging set of tools and techniques for developing and testing software based around feature flags. It’s intended to increase productivity and performance, as well as improve software quality. Of course, you’ll also need to keep tabs on all those feature flags, so it only makes sense to pair feature management with observability for a more holistic view of your software development cycles.

In today's dynamic world of software development and system operations, making informed decisions and developing effective strategies rely heavily on data. The OODA loop, developed by military strategist John Boyd, consists of a recurring cycle: Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. This is then followed by a Feedback stage (not represented in the OODA acronym for some reason) before the cycle repeats itself, allowing for continuous optimization.

We are thrilled to announce another achievement for our company – 2bcloud is now an official AWS Well-Architected Partner! This new partnership, adding to our lates AWS DevOps Competency, marks yet another milestone in our journey to provide exceptional cloud solutions and services to our customers.

Native support for OpenTelemetry metrics in Prometheus.

What is Graphite? Simply put, Graphite is an open-source enterprise-ready time-series database. So what is a time-series database? Well, a time series is a series of data points indexed (or listed or graphed) in time order. Time Series databases have excellent benefits over traditional databases in terms of high performance, higher writes, improved scalability, better reliability, and many more.

System Administrator Appreciation Day, also known as SysAdmin Day, has been celebrated on the last Friday in July since it was created in 2000 by Ted Kekatos. It is a special day dedicated to acknowledging the contributions of system administrators and IT professionals who play a vital role in managing and maintaining the technology infrastructure of organizations.

Machine learning (ML) has quickly become integral to many businesses. Its rapid adoption across almost every industry is because it is a force multiplier: new data can be learned from and understood as it arrives, while historical data can be revisited with new tools and practices.

Part 1 of the series of posts which talk about engineering design decisions to make high cardinality work in time-series databases.

We’ve all seen it: a company experiencing a major incident and going radio silent, leaving their customers to wonder “Are they doing something about this?!”. If you’ve ever been on the inside of something like this, you know the answer is most likely yes, there are people working hard to put out the fire as quickly as possible. But when it comes to incidents, perception is reality for customers.

DCIM is not a static field, but rather a dynamic one that evolves with the changing needs and challenges of data center operations. In this article, we will explore the top 5 trends that are shaping the future of DCIM software and how they can benefit data center operators and users.

On this SysAdmin Appreciation Day, we pause to honor the remarkable individuals who work behind the scenes and whose efforts power every problem solved, every seamless connection, and every technological success. They are the sysadmins—the unsung heroes deserving our heartfelt gratitude. Today, we express our gratitude to the masters of multi-tasking, the conquerors of crashes, and the champions of security—the beloved sysadmins! Your unwavering commitment to excellence inspires us all.

There are tons of tools to choose from when it comes to visualizing data, but Grafana has become one of the best ways for organizations to visualize information and get notified about events happening within their infrastructure or data. According to Kubernetes: In this article, we will take a look at the best practices for monitoring Kubernetes using Grafana.

Happy World Sysadmin Day 2023 Sysadmins are often the last resort when your office system crashes or when the network slows to a trickle. Every July, on the last Friday, professionals worldwide express their gratitude and celebrate our IT heroes, our sysadmins. On July 28, 2023, we thank sysadmins for what they do best: monitoring our IT systems and ensuring they are constantly up, fast, and secure.

DevOps is not just about operating software in production, but also releasing that software to production. Well-functioning continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are critical for the business, and this calls for quality observability to ensure that Lead Time for Changes is kept short and that broken and flaky pipelines are quickly identified and remediated.

Long before a business addresses ‘who’ it will choose to deliver the benefits of colocation, it needs to understand ‘why’. This is especially important if that decision is being made in the context of a choice between edge architectures, or alternatives such as hyper-scale cloud. Typically, the main order of motivation is performance, cost and control.

What is OpenTelemetry? Why is it important? Do SREs need to adopt OTel? An Explain It Like I'm 5.

Earlier this week we shared some exciting news. Checkly has made its mark in not one, but two Gartner Hype Cycles reports. We're being recognized for something we're super passionate about - Monitoring as Code (MaC). This recognition comes in the Hype Cycle for Monitoring and Observability and the first ever Hype Cycle for Site Reliability Engineering. It's a big deal for us, and here's why it should matter to you, too.

The Kubernetes networking landscape is shifting. The traditional Kubernetes Ingress approach is being complemented and, in some cases, replaced by a more powerful, flexible, and extensible standard: the Kubernetes Gateway API. Kubernetes has become the go-to platform for orchestrating and managing containerized applications. A key aspect of Kubernetes that's crucial for the functionality of these applications? Networking.

Today we're releasing custom fields, a powerful new feature that empowers you to tailor FireHydrant to your organization's specific needs and capture essential incident details. Custom fields help you track critical states, involved parties, resolution specifics, affected services, messages, and more — almost anything you want! — all aligned with your unique workflows. Regardless of the size of your team or the maturity of your processes, custom fields adapt to your workflow.

Kelverion is invested in the success of our customers fulfilling their IT automation goals. As part of this endeavor, we provide various resources to ensure our customers can implement and manage their IT automation goals with precision and efficiency. Some of our resources include our webinars, blogs, technical discussions, and guides for things such as ‘Best Practices’ or ‘What’s New’ in the field of IT Automation.

Organizations — particularly those with high security and compliance requirements — need a customizable way to explore and innovate with artificial intelligence and other new technologies. This is why we’re happy to introduce OpenOps, an open source platform designed to help organizations experiment with AI in a secure environment they control. OpenOps is a framework of several tools that enables you to test open source AI models in a sandbox.

Domain Driven Design (DDD) is usually associated with microservice architectures. As microservice architectures have been perceived as burdensome and overly complex, so too have organizations started to call into question the relevance of DDD initiatives. The argument is usually that unless an organization reaches a mega-scale that requires eventing to keep and micro-services to scale horizontally, such architectures are overkill.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) has become an essential part of modern software development, allowing teams to deliver high-quality code at a faster pace. Teams can either build or buy their CI/CD system. In this blog post, we will compare both options - exploring the advantages and disadvantages of each - and why CircleCI may be the better choice.

ELB cost optimization- CloudSpend Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is a load balancing service that automatically and evenly distributes incoming traffic from client-side applications across multiple virtual server instances, like Amazon EC2 instances, containers, or IP addresses, in different availability zones. It smoothly handles server instance failover and unavailability, thus increasing the application’s fault tolerance.

In the constantly evolving world of technology, managing containerized applications at a scale that can match growing business demands is a challenging task. Microsoft, however, has emerged as a leader in this field, offering the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). AKS is a managed container orchestration service that provides a rich and robust platform for developers to deploy, scale, and manage their applications.

The rise of self-hosting has revolutionized the way businesses operate online. With organizations increasingly moving away from traditional hosting services to manage their own infrastructure, the need for effective monitoring solutions has become paramount. However, self-hosting monitoring poses numerous challenges that can make it a daunting task for many businesses.

As a leader in IT, the question of whether or not it makes sense to adopt a dedicated software troubleshooting solution probably comes up from time to time. If it's happened in your organization — no worries — you're not alone. Many teams wonder if their current tools, such as an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solution or a suite of open-source solutions are sufficient.

In the fast-paced high-tech industry, efficient incident management is a critical factor in maintaining brand reputation, employee morale, and most importantly, your bottom line. Good practices can result in reduced downtime, increased learning opportunities from incidents, and an enhanced reputation among both the engineering community and customers. But quantifying the true cost of incidents has always been a challenge — until now.

Automation is gaining more power every day, as organizations realize how IT processes directly impact the business and can help it grow … or, hold it back. We’re seeing a staggering climb in task-related demands for IT service management (ITSM), as volumes of work seem to multiply overnight. Organizations are reaching a point where manual process methods can put the business in jeopardy, as human IT staff cannot keep up.

In this article, we will take a look at what Graphite and Grafana are and what they are used for. Some people might mix these two up, but they do completely different jobs when creating a monitoring system. Let’s take a look these tools in more depth.

The growing popularity of IoT devices has revolutionized the way we interact with technology. From smart homes to industrial automation, these devices have become an integral part of our lives. However, managing and monitoring a large fleet of IoT devices can be a daunting task. With the sheer volume of data being generated by these devices, it becomes crucial to have a robust monitoring system in place.

Collectd is a data collection software that allows you to fetch metrics from a machine being monitored locally and push them to Graphite. Everything is done by plugins. The collectd plugins can collect metrics on CPU, memory, Postgres, JVM, and many more metrics. Plugins can also be used to push these metrics to Graphite, aggregate data, send alerts, and send notifications to email.

OpenTelemetry vs. Prometheus - Difference in architecture, and metrics.

We’re pleased to announce that the Komodor platform has published an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Blueprints CDK Add-On. Amazon EKS is a managed Kubernetes service that streamlines the deployment and scaling of cloud-based or on-prem K8s clusters.

As businesses embrace more cloud-native technologies and IT infrastructure becomes more dispersed, they must connect their business goals and end-user experience with the availability and performance of their IT infrastructure. This change necessitates infrastructure monitoring to assure compatibility with cloud environments, operating systems, storage, servers, virtualized systems, and other components.

With the latest suite of integrations between Megaport and Oracle Cloud, boosting performance and reducing costs across your cloud suite is easier than ever.

Are you ready to supercharge your cloud experience and take your applications to new heights? Look no further! Azure Storage Global Accelerator is here to rev up your cloud journey like never before. If you’ve ever felt like your data needed a boost to reach its destination faster, then this innovative service from Microsoft Azure is exactly what you need.

Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard for container orchestration, with its ability to automate deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. However, even with the best practices and expertise, Kubernetes deployment can sometimes be a complex and challenging process. It involves multiple layers of infrastructure, including the application, Kubernetes cluster, nodes, network, and storage, and each layer can have its own set of issues and challenges.

As businesses increasingly migrate to the cloud, the ability to monitor these environments becomes critically important. Digital Ocean is a popular choice for developers due to its simplicity and scalability. However, effectively monitoring resources and applications within Digital Ocean can pose unique challenges. Hosted Graphite and Telegraf provide powerful solutions for these challenges, allowing users to visualize data, track system metrics in real time, and troubleshoot issues quickly.

In this article, we’ll cover our newest feature- Microsoft Teams notifications! We’ll walk you through how to set it up, and we’ll take a look at why we are constantly making the MetricFire experience better.

More than three decades have passed since Stephen R. Covey made the world highly effective. His 1989 bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, inspired just about everyone. How could anyone pass up the chance to become highly effective by adopting just seven new habits!?

One day a few years ago, Sushil Kumar, our head of DevOps, was worried. A key admin on his team in charge of private and public cloud infrastructure had just given notice that he was leaving in two weeks. Even after scheduling a knowledge transfer session to other team admins, Kumar saw that their operations would be at risk. And he was right. Kumar and his team spent the next 18 months dealing with the fallout.

Get to know the differences between cloud-native and cloud-based applications, their benefits, and why a cloud-native tool like Cloudsmith is a game-changer for efficient and secure software artifact management. The term 'cloud' has become a buzzword in the tech industry, often used interchangeably to describe anything from online storage to complex computing services. But what does it really mean? And more importantly, what does it mean for your business?

We recently ran our first hackathon in quite some time. Over two days, our team collaborated in groups on various topics. By the end of it, we had 12 demos to share with the rest of the team. These ranged from improvements in debugging HTTP request responses to the delightful “automatic swag sharer.” Within our groups, a number of us tried integrating with OpenAI’s GPT to see what smarts we could bring to our product.

D2iQ has introduced an AI assistant that helps organizations resolve problems more quickly and easily, including coding errors and system failures. The new DKP AI Navigator can help reduce the duration and cost of system and application bottlenecks, misconfigurations, and downtime, and ultimately help organizations overcome the Kubernetes skills gap.

DevOps and DevSecOps have gained more attention in recent years in the world of software development. While both of these methodologies emphasize the agile development process and team collaboration, there are some key differences that distinguish them. Understanding these distinctions is critical for software development teams and organizations to determine which methodology is best suited to their requirements. In this article, we’ll learn about the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps.

The Kubernetes & Cloud Native Glossary This post will provide you with an A-Z guide of terms associated with Kubernetes and Cloud Native. Through this, we have compiled a list of over 100 terms with the aim of helping you understand the terminology required to start learning about Kubernetes and Cloud Native. Back to Start.

Microsoft Azure, a forerunner in the realm of cloud computing, has revolutionized how businesses manage, store, and deploy their IT resources. However, comprehending the plethora of services and offerings provided by Azure can prove to be a daunting task. This article aims to demystify Azure’s three fundamental cloud services: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).

In today's digital landscape, network management is more important than ever. As businesses continue to expand and increase in complexity, so do their networks. Aruba switches play a vital role in this ecosystem by providing reliable, high-performance networking solutions for enterprise-level organizations. However, effective monitoring of these switches can be a challenge without the right tools at your disposal.

Salt Security had deployed OpenTelemetry but found it insufficient. So the company engineers evaluated Helios, which visualizes distributed tracing for fast troubleshooting. My role as the Director of Platform Engineering at Salt Security lets me pursue my passion for cloud-native tech and for solving difficult system-design challenges. One of the recent challenges we solved had to do with visibility into our services. Or lack thereof.

As we stand on the brink of the fourth industrial revolution, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a key player in this brave new world. It’s akin to a jigsaw puzzle, providing the bits and pieces that, when properly assembled, can give rise to a complete and holistic picture of our digitized environment. At the heart of this transformation lies Microsoft’s Azure IoT, a comprehensive suite of services and solutions tailored to unlock the full potential of IoT.

Minecraft servers play a vital role in providing players with a dynamic and immersive multiplayer experience. Whether you're running a private server or managing a large-scale server network, performance and reliability define the quality of the gaming experience for all. While playing, a small lag or downtime can make players frustrated and keep worrying if there will be another lag. This is where monitoring your Minecraft servers comes into play.

Voice over IP (VoIP) is a fairly old technology, brought into prominence during the 90s as an alternative to the hegemony of public switched telephone network (PSTN) telephony providers in the market. While VoIP was an alternative to normal telephone at that time, it soon led to a cascade of technological developments that changed the IT landscape. In a modern IT organization, VoIP-based technologies are indispensable.

Every team has a workflow, even if it’s chaotic or lacks consistency. It’s a no-brainer, though, that in the fast-paced world of software development, a clear and well-defined path to guide your work is essential to move efficiently. Workflows provide just that — the structure and framework that developers need to streamline their processes, collaborate effectively, and optimize productivity.

Oh, it’s a beautiful day for cloud computing! You might be sitting in your workspace, coffee in hand, getting ready to step into the world of Microsoft Azure. Good news! You’re about to embark on a journey into the vast universe of cloud services, but don’t worry, this guide has got you covered.

In Part 1 of this series, you learned the core components of Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestrator for deploying and scaling applications in distributed environments. You also saw how to deploy a simple application to your cluster, then change its replica count to scale it up or down. In this article, you’ll get a deeper look at the networking and monitoring features available with Kubernetes.

Visibility into the upstream and downstream dependencies of your services is key to maintaining a performant microservices environment. Application developers and SREs rely on this visibility to quickly trace issues back to the source, which is essential during incidents—when time is of the essence—throughout day-to-day operations, and as systems evolve and scale.

In software development, GitOps and DevOps are prominent techniques for enhancing collaboration and automating software delivery processes. While these two models aim to improve the efficiency of the software development life cycle, they differ in their core principles and implementation.

In today’s software development panorama, there's a philosophy which really stands out and continues to influence the thought processes of numerous creative minds and progressive organisations: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). FOSS is a champion of collaboration, absolute accessibility, and the freedom to alter, share, and build upon existing software devoid of any licensing impediments.

Are data center managers reversing their cloud strategy? Cloud repatriation is the process of migrating applications, data, and workloads from a public cloud environment to on-premise infrastructure, and it’s becoming a popular data center trend. According to IDC, 70-80% of companies are repatriating at least some of their data each year.

According to Cisco’s 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report, 82% of IT leaders say that they have adopted a hybrid cloud. Cloud adoption has been a popular topic of conversation among many companies. Some wanted to make the huge leap from on-premises to cloud; some didn’t. Although the cloud has numerous benefits, it’s wise to keep critical resources limited to on-premises. Why, you might ask?

Application Programming Interface, or API, is an important element to consider when you design an online product or platform. Well-designed API is equivalent to a well-designed user interface for enterprise customers. When you implement an intuitive and easy-to-use interface, your product can retain and attract more users.

Welcome to the thrilling era of cloud computing, where digitization is no longer a trendy phrase but an operational reality for numerous businesses. Among the key players in this transformative phase, Microsoft Azure has carved a niche for itself. Known for its powerful and dynamic infrastructure, Azure leads the way in delivering exceptional cloud services.

One of Netreo’s hallmark features is automated device discovery, onboarding and configuration. When you first fire up Netreo, it searches your entire infrastructure to identify and add devices for your monitoring needs.

The Datadog Service Catalog centralizes your organization’s knowledge about the ownership, reliability, performance, costs, and security of your services. If you’re also using Backstage to keep track of your services, you can leverage our support for Backstage YAML to easily consolidate and maintain all your service information in the Service Catalog.

Netdata Agents and Parents now have a new UI! Steady to our schedule, this is another great Netdata release!

I firmly believe in never letting a good incident go to waste. Incidents expose weak spots and create opportunities for medium and long-term investments. In analyzing incidents and understanding their root causes, organizations can identify areas that require additional resources or enhancements. When incidents are used to align your platform and product engineering, it opens up opportunities to enhance the performance and security of your product.

There’s no end in sight for the more-than-fair share of technological advancements the telecommunications sector has seen. And with change, comes challenges. The infrastructures that establish digital communication and connectivity that nearly everyone depends on are in regular, ongoing need of upgrades, which calls for significant investments in building and maintaining them. Much of the relevant decision-making comes from Communication Service Providers (CSPs).

Welcome back to our Everyday Use Case series, where we continue to explore the real-world workflows for GitKraken Workspaces and show you practical ways to make routine tasks faster and simpler. In our previous article, we unpacked how GitKraken Workspaces simplifies the onboarding process for new team members in complex multi-repo projects. Now, we shift our focus to another crucial element of project development: Team Collaboration.

Your organization depends on reliable network and endpoint security to ensure that all data is handled, stored, and protected properly. Generally, a comprehensive network security plan includes anti-virus software, access management, zero-trust policies, and endpoint security tools, among other things. A Firewall is considered to be one of the most important components of a network security plan.

In the dynamic landscape of software development, the terms DevOps and Platform Engineering have garnered attention. Both concepts, although distinct, aim at a shared goal: to build efficient, streamlined systems that simplify code deployment within organizations.

SysOps teams know how crucial observability is to maintaining around-the-clock infrastructure health. And while HAProxy already provides reliable logging and stats (for diagnostics and monitoring), what if you could supplement those with a real-time alerting system? That idea inspired our initial inclusion of mailers in HAProxy. Since then, users have been asking for deeper mailer customizability—and we’re thrilled to deliver that with Lua-based email alerts in HAProxy 2.8.