Recording rules is a clever concept introduced by Prometheus for storing results of query expressions in a form of a new time series. It is similar to materialized view and helps to speed up queries by using data pre-computed in advance instead of doing all the hard work on query time. Like materialized views, recording rules are extremely useful when user knows exactly what needs to be pre-computed. For example, a complex panel on Grafana dashboard or SLO objective.
Data visualizations take complex information and present it in a clean and easy-to-understand visual. Done right, they can allow quick insight through easy pattern and outlier recognition. Done wrong, it can confuse, obfuscate, and lead to wrong conclusions. Yikes! Over the past few months, we've been hard at work modernizing Honeycomb’s data visualizations to address consistency issues, confusing displays, access to settings, and to improve their overall look and feel.
A private status page is a website or communication platform that provides status updates and notifications to a specific group of people rather than the general public. Private status pages are often used by companies to keep their employees, users, or partners informed about the status of their products, services, infrastructure, vendors, and providers.
A security approach for the full application stack is now critical for technologists to manage rapidly expanding attack surfaces. Research published today by Cisco AppDynamics highlights the challenges that technologists in all sectors are facing as they try to manage application security across an ever more dynamic IT environment.
For a recent feature, I had to download a batch of files from an internal website written in ASP.NET Core. Zipping the files before downloading them, turned out as a great way of easily implementing multi-file download. .NET offers all of the needed features and in this post, I'll show you how to implement it. To get started, I'll create a new ASP.NET Core website: I'm picking the MVC template, but none of the zip-related code is specific to MVC.
Too often, when organizations migrate workloads to the cloud or build new cloud-native applications, they don’t really think about storage. The cloud provider takes care of all that, right? Well, yes and no. There are cost implications to cloud storage that many don’t adequately anticipate—until they get the bill, that is.
In the last few years, fintech enterprises have disrupted the financial services and banking industry by taking everything computing technology offers – from machine learning to blockchain – and turning it up a notch. Traditional financial institutions must now compete with challenger banks offering electronic payment alternatives, peer-to-peer lending, and investment apps.
Artificial intelligence for IT Operations (or AIOps) has been playing an expanding role in helping SREs, DevOps, and developers effectively navigate the challenges around application and infrastructure complexity, pace of change, and data volume that characterize the operations landscape.
The debate between single vendor solutions and best of breed approaches has been ongoing for decades in the technology industry. Engineers have always sought out options and choice, and this has led to a shift in the dominance of large vendors in each stage of technological development. As soon as IBM sold enterprises the mainframe solution, engineers started to look for other options.
Application performance monitoring (APM) involves a mix of tools and practices to track specific performance metrics. Engineers use APM to monitor and maintain the health of their applications and ensure a better user experience. This is crucial to high quality architecture, development, and operations, but it can be difficult to achieve in Kubernetes since the container orchestration system doesn’t provide an easy way to monitor application data like it does for other cluster components.
Network outages happen more often than you think. We may not experience them directly or even know they're occurring at all. When outages affect household names like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and others, however, we're sure to find out after the fact that there was an issue. Depending on the user's activities and the duration of the issue, stress and frustration levels can vary. When a marketer can’t get that ground-breaking advertisement up on Facebook, they can get antsy.
In today’s fast paced and constantly evolving digital landscape, observability has become a critical component of effective software development. Companies are relying more on and using machine and telemetry data to fix customer problems, refine software and applications, and enhance security. However, while more data has empowered teams with more insights, the value derived from that data isn’t keeping pace with this growth. So how can these teams derive more value from telemetry data?
The OpenTelemetry (OTel) project is an open source initiative with the goal of providing vendor-neutral standards and tools that enable users to collect telemetry from any source in their environment and send it to any backend. A core tenet of Datadog is to provide a single, unified platform for customers to easily collect and monitor all of their observability data, regardless of where it comes from.
If you need to deploy a lot of microservices at once and manage them at scale, Kubernetes is hard to beat. But Kubernetes also brings additional complexity that you just might not need. You would be smart to ask yourself these three questions before getting started with Kubernetes.
Every client we meet has been using multiple tools to satisfy their observability needs. We rarely find a greenfield opportunity. As their journey progresses, they have pointed out when the time is right to add ChaosSearch into the fold. There isn't just one symptom; it's usually a combination of things, including high log data volume, unpredictable costs, and ineffective results, to name a few. By the time we talk to clients in this state, the pain and frustration are incredibly high. We created a five-minute video to demonstrate how clients find themselves in this predicament.
How is your organization handling Kubernetes observability? What tools are you using to monitor Kubernetes? Is it a time-consuming, manual process to collect, store and visualize your logging, metrics and tracing data? And, what are you actually getting out of all that investment? At Logz.io we’re trying to make this process easier for customers who are serious about Kubernetes observability. We’ve made significant investments in this area for Kubernetes use cases.
If you’ve been around the observability world for the past few years, you’ve probably heard a few stats around data growth. Worldwide, data is increasing at a 23% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), per IDC. That means in five years, organizations will be dealing with nearly three times the amount of data they have today – generated by diverse and emerging sources, from data centers to cloud sources to edge computing.
If you’ve ever seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, you might remember the scene where Indy and his dad are in a room replete with the most ornate chalices possible, only to realize that the Holy Grail is the most plain, utilitarian one in the room. Windows event logs are the IT version of the plain-looking clay cup that holds the key to answering your service questions and system issues.
NestJS is a popular framework for Node.js that allows you to build efficient and scalable backend applications. With AppSignal, you can monitor your NestJS app with ease and rely on OpenTelemetry to handle third-party instrumentations. AppSignal even provides helper functions to help you build comprehensive custom instrumentations. This article aims to help you get the most out of your AppSignal integration.
Many organizations rely on distributed tracing in Datadog APM to gain end-to-end visibility into the performance of their Kubernetes applications. But as teams grow, it can become impractical for them to manually configure each new application with the libraries and environment variables needed for tracing.
Our development teams continue to improve Progress Flowmon. The latest update takes the core Flowmon product to version 12.2, while our industry-leading Anomaly Detection System (ADS) gets incremented to ADS 12.1.
Every organization reaches a certain size where network and infrastructure monitoring becomes a necessity. And while that “certain size” will depend on whether you’re running a private company, non-profit organization or government agency, the time to act always comes. Network and Infrastructure Monitoring tools enable organizations to harness greater benefits from their computing infrastructures. How you use these tools can even give you a competitive advantage.
We’re creating a new way to install and set up Sentry. Starting with Next.js, you’ll be able to set up new Sentry accounts or create new Sentry Next.js projects via the terminal and running a single command. Getting started is simple(r). While you can still visit sentry.io/signup to create an account or create a project from within the app – now you can skip all the clicks, navigate to your repo and run this command.
Increasingly, the speed and scale of a business can be measured by the resilience and performance of its applications. That’s why organizations are opting to modernize legacy applications by rewriting them using cloud-native tools and platforms. A Gartner study found that by 2025, cloud-native platforms will be the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives, compared to less than 40% in 2021.
In modern application development and architecture, there has been a big push from monolithic, large applications that can do everything a product would need, to many smaller services that have a specific purpose. This onset has brought on the age of microservice frameworks (micro-frameworks), with the goal of making it easier to prototype, build, and design applications in this paradigm.
Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we have discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we explore the impending impact of the metaverse on the future (or now) of work and productivity. Illustration by Akshaya Maheswaran Imagine a world where you can work from anywhere, collaborate with colleagues from around the globe, and attend meetings in virtual reality (VR) conference rooms.
Data Privacy Day is an annual event celebrated on January 28th to raise awareness about the importance of protecting personal information and data privacy. As technology continues to advance and more of our personal information is shared online, it’s crucial for businesses to take steps to safeguard their own data, as well as the data of the customers and users they serve.
The increasing complexity of modern websites and web applications means that a dependency on Application Programming Interfaces—or APIs—is unavoidable. APIs are used throughout software to define interactions between different software applications. They are also indispensable to businesses as they enable them to develop applications that can scale and provide a wealth of services without the need to build every software or server component from scratch.
Kubernetes makes it easier for businesses to automate software deployment and manage applications in the cloud at scale. However, if you’ve ever deployed a cloud native app, you know how difficult it can be to keep it healthy and predictable. DevOps teams and SREs often use distributed tracing to get the insights they need to learn about application health and performance.
In today's digital age, organizations increasingly depend on their technology infrastructure to keep their operations running smoothly. These infrastructures include servers, networking equipment, IoT devices, and applications. The data generated by all this infrastructure (logs, metrics, traces) is known as telemetry data, which has a tremendous potential value to organizations. However, it can be challenging to control telemetry data and utilize it effectively.
HashiCorp Boundary provides a secure way to manage remote access to applications and infrastructure without exposing the underlying network or credentials. Launched two years ago as an open source solution, HashiCorp recently announced a fully managed version on the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP), enabling you to manage identity-based authorizations, user and target onboarding, and more for dynamic environments.
This article is the third of a four-part series of articles about Elasticsearch monitoring. In the first article, we put together an Elasticsearch guide, covering how Elasticsearch works and why the setup and tuning of Elasticsearch requires a good knowledge of configuration options and performance metrics.
The Big SCOM SURVEY is up and running viral again across the entire SCOM community. SCOM lovers of all regions and countries gather for this yearly event to share their perceptions, usage, and plans for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. This year is the third round of the Big SCOM survey, conducted by SCOMathon, the learning and community hub for all SCOM-related topics.
Let’s say you have a script that works when run in an interactive session, but does not produce expected results when run from cron. What could be the problem? Some potential culprits include: Or it could be something else. How to troubleshoot this then, and where to start? Instead of trying fixes at random, I prefer to start by looking at logs.
In data management, numerous roles rely on and regularly use telemetry data. The developer is one of these roles. Developers are the creative masterminds behind the software applications and systems we use and enjoy today. From conception to finished product, they map out, build, test, and maintain software.
You are looking for a website monitoring tool, but there are a vast array of options out there. Which are the important ones that actually help your website and team? What should you focus on to get the best one for you? In this article, we go over the top features that move the needle in serving your needs and why they are important.
On October 3, 2022, the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 23-01, Improving Asset Visibility and Vulnerability Detection on Federal Networks. The directive requires federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agencies to deliver a series of procedures, reports, and process validations for continuous and comprehensive asset visibility by April 3, 2023. Thereafter, agencies must maintain compliance with the directive.
With over 83 million users, GitHub is one of the most popular development tools out there and the third most monitored service on StatusGator. Since so many users depend on GitHub, we wanted to analyze GitHub’s downtime over the past year and see which GitHub features (i.e., Codespaces, PRs, Actions, etc.) were the least reliable.
Many of us (indeed 1 billion plus users worldwide) rely on Microsoft for essential work activities and were impacted yesterday (Wednesday January 25, 2023) when the cloud service provider experienced a prolonged outage. Internet Resilience is a business priority because when critical workforce services like Microsoft go down, global teams are hugely disrupted.
Incidents happen. What matters is how they’re handled. Most organizations have a strategy in place that starts with log searches—and logs/log searching are great, but log searching is also incredibly time consuming. Today, the goal is to get safer software out the door faster, and that means issues need to be discovered and resolved in the most efficient way possible.
StackState commissioned Techstrong Research, a strategy and technology analyst firm, to delve into the current state of observability. The resulting report, “Observability Innovation Report 2023,” provides insightful information. 543 IT professionals were surveyed, globally, across 20 industries. The largest concentration of respondents were in the telecommunications, technology, Internet and electronics sectors, followed by financial services.
Microsoft had its corporate earnings call yesterday and posted weaker guidance. But guess what? Several hours later, the tech giant was hit by a networking outage that took down Azure and other services like Teams and Outlook, affecting millions of users globally.
Reading case studies can be a tedious task for someone who needs to single-handedly manage the entire IT infrastructure of their firm. But hey, why not spend a minute or two if it can provide you some golden tips on how to save time while monitoring your complex IT infrastructures? Here are the stories of two firms that achieved improved performance after switching to Applications Manager. Dig in to learn how they made the best use of our product and achieved a better version of themselves.
Observability has become a bit of a buzzword in the industry for the last few years. Exactly what "observability" means depends on who you ask, but most people would agree its about both: There's plenty of content out there telling you how to implement observability, or what good looks like. But what about bad observability? What are some anti-patterns to watch out for?
The news have been full of coverage: ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the prototype chatbot released by OpenAI in November 2022 seems to hail in a new era of information sourcing, schooling and learning, and interacting with a computer. The service sprinted to one million users in five days after the launch, with many more following until this date.
Observability data provides the insights engineers need to make sense of increasingly complex cloud environments so they can improve the health, performance, and user experience of their systems. These insights can quickly answer business-critical questions like, “what is causing this latency in my front end?” Or, “why is my checkout service returning errors?” Observability is about accessing the right information at the right time to quickly answer these kinds of questions.
Crosser is a Swedish company that builds a streaming analytics platform. The idea behind Crosser is to take the data from a connected, sensor-rich world and integrate it in real time to deliver faster insights and innovation. Primarily focused on the industrial IoT (IIoT) space, Crosser helps manufacturers gain insight into their machines and processes to drive improvements and to take advantage of newer trends and requirements that companies have for their data.
Kubernetes monitoring can be difficult and complex. In order to determine the health of your project at every level, from the application to the operating system to the infrastructure, you need to monitor metrics in all the different layers and components — services, containers, pods, deployments, nodes, and clusters.
Have you ever wished that software development could be faster and focused on quality? Then DevOps may be the answer for your organization. DevOps is a set of practices that combine software development and IT operations to facilitate collaboration between teams. The industry is constantly evolving, and new tools are being introduced daily. With so many options, it can take time to determine which ones are worth your time and money.
The Situation: some employees are reporting that Microsoft Teams is not working properly. You wonder, is there a Microsoft outage today? You jump onto Twitter to check the Microsoft 365 status account and see a trail of updates regarding a Microsoft outage – ugh there is a lengthy Twitter thread. You are in the midst of managing a Microsoft outage today.
Share: When we posted our first ever Momentum blog about a year ago detailing our 2021 achievements, we were just weeks away from Russia’s renewed attack of Ukraine. While the war isn’t won yet and we’re approaching the one year anniversary of the attack, it’s heartening to see how much has changed around the world and that almost everyone now knows the expression: Slava Ukraini! So if we had to choose one word to best describe 2022 it might be: Resilience.
There is no question that wireless networks are taking over. Offices may still have Ethernet cables to each cubicle, but usually, they go unused. Wi-Fi is the new LAN. And so many devices, tablets, smartphones and even some laptop-type devices are now wireless only.
The public cloud can deliver significant business value across infrastructure cost savings, team productivity, service elasticity, and DevOps agility. Yet, up to 70% of organizations regularly overspend in the cloud, minimizing the gap between cloud costs and the revenue cloud investments can drive.
As data volume grows, managing your ELK stack can become resource-intensive. Organizations outgrowing ELK are often using multiple different tools, experiencing performance issues, paying too much in log storage, and spending significant time troubleshooting. But while the pain is real, many are hesitant to make a change. The thought of migration yields fears of lost productivity, performance and financial risks, and disappointment in losing some things you love that you worked hard to create.
eG Innovations is an IGEL Ready partner, and I’m delighted to let you all know that we are a silver sponsor at the IGEL DISRUPT End User Computing (EUC) Forum taking place in Munich, February 14-16, 2023. DISRUPT is a major global event focused on end user computing and the delivery of secure, high-performance digital workspaces to increasingly distributed hybrid workforces, from the cloud.
"How do we keep our data secure?" is the question nearly every organization is asking these days. The last spot any organization wants to be in is that of a security breach. Stephane Nappo, an industry known Chief Security officer, is often heard saying "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and a few minutes of cyber-incident to ruin it". And here he's just referencing the fall out of a business's image from a breach and not even touching on the mass harm that can be done with stolen data in the wrong hands.
If you have been following the news over the last few months, you will agree that the buzzwords for this year are – inflation and recession. Yet, even in these turbulent times, delivering an excellent digital employee experience (DEX) remains an essential aspect of IT. As organizations continue to add various collaboration, communication, and end-user technologies to the mix, new problems will surface.
An API, or application programming interface, is a set of protocols and instructions that allows two software applications to communicate with one other. APIs can be implemented in a number of architectural styles. One of the most popular styles is REST (representational state transfer,) which allows server and client interaction in a stateless manner.
Moving to the cloud is hard. Moving to the cloud and keeping systems secure, data governed, compliances met, and cyberattacks at bay, makes everyone’s jobs significantly harder. The number one concern we hear from Cribl customers about the cloud is, you guessed it — security. If you’re in this boat — eager to adopt the cloud ASAP but also worried about the risks that come with having sensitive data in the cloud — don’t fret. We’re here to help.
2023 started with a boost of positive energy after attending my first CES EDGE23 federal event sponsored by the GBEF (Government Business Executive Forum). As a sponsor of this year’s EDGE23 conference, I represented ScienceLogic as a co-moderator to a very relevant and thoughtful executive round table on navigating the challenges associated with ‘Continuous IT Modernization’.
ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) is a high-performance network backbone built to support scientific research. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and part of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ESnet provides fast, reliable connections between national laboratories, supercomputing facilities, and scientific instruments around the globe. Our mission is to allow scientists to collaborate and perform research without worrying about distance or location.
Kubernetes has clearly established itself as one of the most influential technologies in the cloud applications and DevOps space. Its powerful flexibility and scalability have inarguably made it the most popular container orchestration platform in modern software development, helping teams manage hundreds of containers efficiently.
Elastic Observability provides a full-stack observability solution, by supporting metrics, traces, and logs for applications and infrastructure. In a previous blog, I showed you how to monitor your AWS infrastructure running a three-tier application. Specifically we reviewed metrics ingest and analysis on Elastic Observability for EC2, VPC, ELB, and RDS.
“Why is everything down?” Nod your head if you’ve had this experience. No changes were made, yet suddenly everything is down. Where do you start looking? If you’ve been in the EUC world long enough, you probably have a good idea. But what about those junior admins you are mentoring so that you can get some time back in your day?
Gain executive-level insights on Cisco AppDynamics’ for on-premises, hybrid and cloud customers from Ronak Desai, Cisco SVP & GM AppDynamics and full-stack observability.
Most SaaS products have nice, organic growth when they work well. Employees log in, they click around and make stuff, then they share links with others who do the same. After a few weeks or months, there are thousand of objects. Some are abandoned, and some are mission-critical. Different people also bring different perspectives, so they name things that are relevant to their role and position in the team, which may be confusing to others outside their realm.
An important part of the client-service provider relationship is a well-written Service Level Agreement (SLA). Most service providers and clients agree on this. What some service providers don’t know is exactly how they should measure SLA. There is often a lot of confusion between the SLA metrics that define contractual agreements and the wide range of key performance indicators (KPIs) you can also use to monitor operations. They are both important, but they are not the same.
Does your organization’s data include sensitive information, like intellectual property or personally identifiable information (PII)? Do you want to protect your data from being stolen and sent (i.e., exfiltrated) to external web services? If the answer to these questions is yes, then Elastic’s Data Exfiltration Detection package can help you identify when critical enterprise data is being stolen and exfiltrated.
Citrix is a popular virtualization and remote access solution that allows users to access their applications and data from anywhere. However, like any technology, it is not without its issues. One common problem that users may encounter is the “resource enumeration” issue. Resource enumeration is a process that occurs when the Citrix server scans the network for available resources, such as printers, scanners, and other peripherals.
The airport is shutdown in the midst of a busy time, masses of people are stranded, pilots wait in the cockpit awaiting ground information, there’s confusion and panic among the crew. This could easily be a scene from Die Hard 2 where the villains take over an airport and seize control of all electrical equipment. But, hate to break it to you, this actually happened. Is it possible for one person to disrupt the entire nation’s aviation system? Apparently, yes.
Kubernetes, a graduated project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) ecosystem, is the most prominent and widely used container orchestration systems. It’s used to manage and deploy containers in a wide range of environments, from IoT devices based on Raspberry Pis to enterprise environments consisting of millions of services.
When people hear ‘containers,’ they don’t immediately think about an IT solution that helps businesses create and distribute applications seamlessly. However, the container concept has been around for a long time, helping companies in various industries globally. Containers continue to change the landscape of app development and deployment. This guide below will help you understand containerization and the best orchestration tools to manage containers.
Accurate data is one of the most important aspects of any organizational function. It helps in decision-making and planning, and for most businesses, it also helps in generating revenue. The data can be anything from a list of clients and products to an inventory list. Nothing comes close to SQL timestamps regarding data accuracy, timeliness, and management. SQL Server timestamp is a critical component of relational databases, but they aren’t used on a daily basis by most database professionals.
Not long ago, we announced the launch of Honeycomb’s Service Map, a new feature that gives users the ability to get an overall, filterable view of their system and how everything is connected, along with some exciting new enhancements to BubbleUp. What’s the story behind these changes? They make it even easier for developers to zero-in on issues, even when they are hidden in billions of lines of code.
Baking a delicious pizza in a wood-fired oven requires a combination of skill, experience and the right tools. The same is true for achieving optimal observability in a Kubernetes environment. In this post, we'll explore some of the lessons learned from baking pizza in a wood-fired oven and apply them to the world of Kubernetes observability.
Congratulations, you’ve worked hard to get Cribl Stream into your technology stack. Buying a new tool is a non-trivial task, so be sure to pat yourself on the back. Now the work starts: You have to deploy Stream and get full value to justify the cost. It’s critical to get started with the right plan to accelerate delivery and maximize the value of Stream. I’m going to start by sharing some ideas about how to get started with Cribl Stream in your first hundred days.
An effective alerting strategy is the difference between reacting to an outage and stopping it before it starts. That’s why at Coralogix, we’re constantly releasing new features that redefine how alerts are consumed, to enable teams to push their ambitions even further, release with confidence, and tackle issues proactively. Alerts Map is now an indispensable tool for that mission.
When you are designing and building applications, you should consider how to monitor them once they become live. You do not want to be blindsided by errors and degrading performances as you operate them. When your applications fail to provide optimal performance, it can broadly impact your business. Engineers will often be distracted to investigate and fix the issues. Customers will complain. It can eventually hit your bottom line.
Bugs are one of the most troubling aspects of software development; they appear out of nowhere and cause everything to stop working. Most of the time, they can be resolved quickly; however, others can be gruesome and take hours/days to fix. Next.js is one of the most popular web development frameworks in the current world, and as a programming tool, it didn’t escape the bug dilemma either.
We're proud to announce we have added a new check to our service: Lighthouse SEO. Using this check you can detect (and get solution suggestions) for SEO and performance problems.
Before we jump into cloud cost optimization, let us address the elephant in the room. Businesses are moving to the cloud but are struggling with unpredictable cloud bills. If you are a business owner who has moved to the cloud recently, you need to understand each cloud touchpoint and get a transparent view of your cloud services. When it comes to cloud cost optimization, there are many tools and techniques that organizations can adopt. Most of these can only take you so far.
The System Administrator! AKA the Sysadmin. The keeper of the network, computers – well basically all things technology. The one who is hated for imposing complex passwords and other restrictions, but taken for granted when everything works well. They are the first to be called when “facebuuk.com” reports: “domain does not exist”.
Can companies afford to have network breakdowns or downtime in this digital-first era? No, they can't. With digital transformation taking place across industries and increasing expectations to stay connected wherever you are, companies need to up their game and ensure they provide uninterrupted network services and high performance. Therefore, understanding network fault management and monitoring - what they are, and the benefits of using a fault management system can help you manage your network more effectively.
You’re part of a data-driven engineering team. You have a rich, complex, and dynamic set of tools but you’re struggling to discover and share insights from all that data. So, you're looking for a platform that will help unify it all. Naturally, you want to compare Grafana vs. Power BI - the big names. Plus, there's a new player on the block - SquaredUp.
Understand what makes a storage device S.M.A.R.T and how to monitor a self monitoring component using Netdata.
Find out how to effectively and easily monitor and troubleshoot BIND 9 using Netdata.
Observability, monitoring, and telemetry are crucial for maintaining the performance and reliability of modern systems. Their concepts are often used interchangeably, but they have distinct differences that are important to understand. In this blog, we’ll explore each concept in detail, including key characteristics and examples of tools. We’ll also compare observability vs monitoring vs telemetry and discuss when it’s appropriate to use each.
Learn how Solutia Consulting relied on Checkly to confidently deploy client software updates Solutia Consulting is an information technology consulting firm based in Minneapolis / St. Paul, Minnesota. Solutia provides assessment and advisory services, dev team staff augmentation, managed IT services, and project-based contract work for a variety of clients, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to mid-sized enterprises and organizations.
The upcoming release of Vantage DX packs in more usability features to help IT teams quickly get to the root of Teams performance issues. Our recently launched Teams dashboards have been updated and UI improvements now provide quick access to Teams Meeting Room performance data and new Microsoft Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) integration upgrades simplify set up.
We are happy to announce that we have created a SCOM integration with OpenAI Chat GPT. The solution checks for any alert generated in SCOM and then requests the artificial intelligence service to give you possible root causes and fixes to solve the issue. Moreover, it will take into account any other issues the respective degraded component or service is experiencing and consult you accordingly.
Over the last couple of years, there has been exponential growth in the volume and variety of machine data. The main reason has been the ever-growing number of connected machines in IT infrastructure, the sophistication of data algorithms, and the increased use of IoT devices. This data has proven to be quite valuable - even necessary - as an organisation can analyse and use it to drive productivity, improve efficiency, and gain visibility for their business. There is a catch: to make the machine data work for them, organisations need a simplified tool that can analyse and visualise. This is where Splunk comes in.
Cloud Logging’s Log Analytics, with advanced search, as well as aggregation and transformation of all log data types, is now generally available.
Here are five ways to protect your organization from cybersecurity attacks and vulnerabilities during high-incident seasons. With the busy holiday season over, is it safe to let your guard down concerning cybersecurity? Not exactly. While the holiday season is often seen as prime time for cyberattacks, it’s not the only time of year organizations experience a surge in cyber threats.
The world of the ecommere is full of narrow margins and high risk. Prioritisation means focussing on one thing means skipping or delaying something else. When speaking to ecommerce management teams a frequent topic of conversation is finding budget for site improvements. Everyone wants to have a reliable, fast website – but how can you justify the time and energy it takes to create one?
Find out how to effectively and easily monitor and troubleshoot Memcached using Netdata.
Unlock the full potential of your observability stack with continuous profiling Identifying performance bottlenecks and wasteful computations can be a complex and challenging task, particularly in modern cloud-native environments. As the complexity of cloud-native environments increases, so does the need for effective observability solutions.
Now you can experience our products—without scheduling a live demo or free trial. The ScienceLogic product tours are designed to give you a self-service ScienceLogic experience, so you can see for yourself first-hand how our AIOps & Observability solutions can help solve your organization’s hardest challenges.
Network outages are both common and expensive – usually far more expensive than people realize. Yes, the network is down and the organization is losing money, but do you really appreciate how much money? And how much an outage can actually cost on a per minute basis? It’s not only more than most people think, it’s something that can be mitigated fairly easily.
You’re responsible for administering hundreds to thousands of server endpoints deployed at your company. You receive daily requests from the application teams requiring agents be installed on new servers, from the compliance team tracking agent upgrades and from the operations team concerned logs and metrics are missing from the dashboards they’re monitoring. You review your workload and realize you must log into each individual server for every request you’ve received.
Most people are unaware of the “full stack” in web development that includes the front-end user interface, middleware servers, and backend database. Casual technology users around the world usually only experience the front end, which renders the cute graphics and friendly colors your brain enjoys seeing as you browse, shop, and comment on social media.
What’s your least favorite thing as an IT professional to hear when you first stroll into the office in the morning? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that, like me, many of you might say something like this: “Everything is slow….” Ughhhhhhh, if we had a dime for every time we’ve heard end users utter that vague and unhelpful statement over our careers, we’d have a boatload of dimes. Across IT roles, this tiring theme seems to follow us wherever we go.
This blog post is a how-to guide for Kubernetes troubleshooting. Our vision is that any engineer can keep Kubernetes-based applications up and running smoothly, regardless of their level of Kubernetes expertise and their knowledge of the services in the environment. Right out of the box, StackState aims to monitor, alert and then guide an engineer directly to the problem, helping them remediate the issue quickly.
Are Citrix latency causing issues for your end users? Pin-pointing the root-cause of latency can be a challenge because it can occur in any part of the network and in any tier. Knowing where to start troubleshooting can mean the difference between end-users not noticing and a flood of support tickets on the service desk. In this guide I teamed up with eG Innovations to talk about what Citrix latency is, why it matters, and how we can improve it.
Kubernetes has become the preferred tool for DevOps engineers to deploy and manage containerized applications on one or multiple servers. These compute nodes are also known as clusters, and their performance is crucial to the success of an application. If a Kubernetes cluster isn’t performing optimally, the application’s availability and performance will suffer, leading to unhappy users and even revenue loss.
vCenter High Availability (vCenter HA) protects against vCenter Server application failures. Using automated failover from active to passive, vCenter HA supports high availability with minimal downtime.
If we look at the last decade, organizations are increasingly championing the movement of employee satisfaction. Customer satisfaction, of course, is one of the quintessential factors for any enterprise to be successful. However, in recent times, enterprises have realized that employee satisfaction is an enabler of customer satisfaction and business success. With the onset of hybrid work models, UEM solutions are more centred towards employee enablement.
Learn more about the connection between SRE, DevOps and reliability.
In November/December 2022 I attended AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. It was certainly an experience for this small town kid from New Zealand, and one that I took a lot away from. While I was at the conference, I took the time to walk around and take notes. In this article I will share the trends that I observed which I think will have an impact on SRE work in 2023 and beyond, including: ...and others.
Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service provided by AWS and is tailor-made for serverless applications. As a fully managed service, we don’t have to worry about operational tasks with DynamoDB, such as hardware provisioning, configuring instances, scaling, replications, software patching, etc.
Find out how to effectively and easily monitor and troubleshoot NTPdaemon using Netdata.
SAP, the world’s leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, is widely used by organizations across the globe. Since its inception in the 1970s, SAP has become the top choice for supporting the most critical and deeply integrated enterprise applications. In fact, IDC notes that SAP is a market share leader in analytics and business intelligence, ERP and supply chain management.
As the recruitment team here at Grafana Labs, we used to struggle to get a comprehensive view of our recruitment data. We had multiple sources of information, but it was difficult to pool that information so we could see the big picture and identify trends and patterns that could help us hire the right talent in a highly competitive market.
This article was originally published in The New Stack and is reposted here with permission. A consequence of living in a rapidly changing society is that the state of all systems changes just as rapidly, and with that comes inconsistencies in operations. But what if you could foresee these inconsistencies? What if you could take a peek into the future? This is where time-series data can help.
As the person on the front lines, you know that providing the best service possible can be what makes your ITSM organization succeed. Every day, you work to build the relationships that help your organization create value for end-users. However, when you have inefficient processes, you end up having to be the person responding to an upset user.
If you were asked to evaluate how good crews were at fighting forest fires, what metric would you use? Would you consider it a regression on your firefighters’ part if you had more fires this year than the last? Would the size and impact of a forest fire be a measure of their success? Would you look for the cause—such as a person lighting it, an environmental factor, etc—and act on it? Chances are that yes, that’s what you’d do.
Veteran programmer? Experienced application performance monitoring (APM) connoisseur? Whatever your specific tech chops, you know the importance of ensuring your applications are running optimally. Every minute a business app is down or slow to respond translates into lost revenue and frustrated customers. That’s why smart businesses rely on APM solutions to monitor and analyze their applications’ performance in real-time.
The whole point of our beloved networks is to deliver applications and services to real people sitting at computers. So, as network engineers, monitoring the performance and efficiency of our networks is a crucial part of our job. Flow data, in particular, is a powerful tool that provides valuable insights into what’s happening in our networks for ongoing monitoring and troubleshooting poor-performing applications.
User experience and performance are two of the most important metrics of any game. You need to ensure that it runs as optimally as possible on any platform. Ideally, you don’t want to wait for players to angrily tell you something is not working or worse, broken. In a perfect world you’d get notified about any issues that arise in your game with as much context surrounding the issue as possible.
As an engineer building a distributed application, every now and then I need to look for and analyze bottlenecks in our system. There can be several triggers for conducting a bottleneck analysis, for example: In this blog post I’ll share how I’ve been using our own product, Helios, and the power of distributed tracing, to help pinpoint bottlenecks in our system and resolve them fast.
We’re proud of our many customers and users around the globe that trust Icinga for critical IT infrastructure monitoring. That’s why we’re now showcasing some of these enterprises with their Success stories. It’s stories from companies or organizations just like yours, of any size and different kinds of industries. Some of them are our long-standing customers, others have just recently profited from migrating from another solution to Icinga.
There are high expectations from users for council websites to be up and reliable. They are also required to adhere to guidelines set out in the Service Standard to make their website accessible and user friendly. Alongside these challenges, councils are often underfunded and understaffed which can make council web management teams stretched. Here are three key metrics that councils should be measuring to improve website reliability.
We are delighted to share the news that our integration with leading, real-time Application Performance Monitoring (APM) vendor Cisco AppDynamics is now listed on the AppDynamics Marketplace.
As we at Splunk accelerate our cloud journey, we’re often faced with the decision of when to use logs vs metrics — a decision many in IT face. On the surface, one can do a lot by just observing logs and events. In fact, in the early days of Splunk Cloud, this is exactly how we observed everything. As we continue to grow, however, we find ourselves using a combination of both. This post lays out the overall difference in logs and metrics and when to best utilize each.
Find out how to effectively and easily monitor and troubleshoot MongoDB using Netdata.
A lot of site owners underestimate the consequences of downtime, assuming that a brief outage won’t do much harm to their business. But this can leave them with broken web pages that are either poorly rendered or filled with bugs, frustrating users into hitting the “back” button since they can’t navigate the site. The truth is, keeping outages at bay beats fixing them after the fact, even with a guaranteed backup plan.
If there is one thing organizations can take away from the past few years, it's that they are far more vulnerable than they could realize before. From pandemics to critical supply shortages to widespread data breaches and natural disasters, businesses that don’t have plans in place to handle and respond to emergencies are at tremendous risk. As leaders plan for inevitable crises and disruption, interest in business resilience and continuity grows.
Prometheus is a widely utilized time-series database for monitoring the health and performance of AWS infrastructure. With its ecosystem of data collection, storage, alerting, and analysis capabilities, among others, the open source tool set offers a complete package of monitoring solutions. Prometheus is ideal for scraping metrics from cloud-native services, storing the data for analysis, and monitoring the data with alerts.
Data routing is a crucial but complex task for companies of all sizes. Ensuring that the right data is sent to the right tools can be a time-consuming and difficult process, and when things go wrong, it can have costly consequences. This is why having a robust data routing strategy is essential for any organization.
When monitoring your application performance or troubleshooting an issue in production, context is key. The more information available, the faster the prevention of or detection of a user impacting issue. Observability tools offer many different features, like code profiling, to help contextualize your data. In this post, I’ll discuss what code profiling is and show an example of how it works.
The success of your website lies in how satisfied your users are with it. To help ensure the quality of your user experience, Google uses various signals from a web page. The three Core Web Vitals are some of the most important ones. In this article, I’ll talk about what each Core Web Vital means and how to optimize them to deliver a better user experience.
Oracle is a highly performant and reliable multi-model database management system running online transaction processing, data warehousing, and mixed database workloads. Although Oracle environments are reliable and performant, monitoring dedicated Oracle on-premise or cloud deployments is crucial to safeguard business continuity.
Share: One of the latest benchmarks we did was for OSMC 2022 talk VictoriaMetrics: scaling to 100 million metrics per second - see the video and slides. While the fact that VictoriaMetrics can handle data ingestion rate at 100 million samples per second for one billion of active time series is newsworthy on its own, the benchmark tool used to generate that kind of load is usually overlooked. This blog post explains the challenges of scaling the prometheus-benchmark tool for generating such a load.
Sensu offers a complete solution for infrastructure monitoring and observability, designed to give you visibility into all of your important infrastructure components, including containers, applications, traditional server closets, and the cloud. Sensu Go is a commercial product based on an open source core that is freely available under a permissive MIT License and publicly available on GitHub.
With Solr 9 the Autoscaling Framework was removed – for being too complex and not terribly reliable – and instead we have Replica Placement Plugins. Unlike Autoscaling, replica placement only happens when you create a collection or add a new replica. Hence the name: it’s about where to place these new replicas. In this article, we’ll look at the available replica placement plugins, what you can use them for and how to use them.
As a small business, we at Monitive understand the importance of being mindful of both the past and the future. We've been in the uptime monitoring business for almost 13 years now and we are proud to say that in 2022, we had a decent financial performance. As we value transparency and honesty above all else, we're excited to share our accomplishments with you and also talk about our plans for 2023.
Learn more about how culture is the true driver of DevOps success.
With server costs mounting due to both demand and complexity, businesses of all sizes are beginning to explore how they can optimize their server infrastructure to reduce costs. One of the most effective strategies for doing this is Application Performance Monitoring (APM): the use of a dedicated tool to proactively monitor, diagnose, and troubleshoot performance issues in real-time.
So by now, you are probably aware that InfluxData has been busy building the next generation of the InfluxDB storage engine. If you dig a little deeper, you will start to uncover some concepts that might be foreign to you: These open-source projects are some of the core building blocks that make up the new storage engine. For the most part, you won’t need to worry about what’s under the hood.
The threat landscape that organizations faced in 2022 and continue to face in 2023 is large, complex, and continuously changing. Defense requires a multi-layered approach that delivers monitoring, detection, and response at many points within on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure and systems. A Network Detection and Response (NDR) solution is critical to a modern cybersecurity defense strategy.
When a cron job does not run on time, Healthchecks can notify you using various methods. One of the supported methods is Signal messages. Signal is an end-to-end encrypted messenger app run by a non-profit Signal Foundation. Signal’s mobile client, desktop client, and server are free and open-source software (with some exceptions–read on!).
How is Grafana like an invisibility cloak? At Adobe, it’s one of just four tools they’re using to build observability directly into their CI/CD pipeline, making it essentially invisible — but nonetheless impactful — to thousands of developers across the organization who use it in their day-to-day lives.
This week marks a decade since the ALBA-1 submarine cable began carrying traffic between Cuba and the global internet. On 20 January 2013, I published the first evidence of this historic subsea cable activation which enabled Cuba to finally break its dependence on geostationary satellite service for the country’s international connectivity. ALBA-1 was one of my first lessons on how geopolitics can shape the physical internet.
Whether you’ve been following along with our Authors’ Cut series or doing some self-paced learning, our O’Reilly book Observability Engineering is one of the best resources for jumpstarting your observability journey. It serves as a blueprint to help you understand and map out the technical and cultural requirements of implementing observability into your organization.
PowerApps is something of a revolution in the making – and Microsoft is keen to promote it for enterprises everywhere. Being able to create your own apps to serve specific business functions is a huge win for any company looking to drive efficiency. And now with Azure Communication Services (ACS), you can even integrate Teams features in your apps.
It’s a red alert for any IT team. Hearing the words “Microsoft Teams is down” can scare even the most experienced tech department. But, with a few clear definitions – and a way to spot outages and solve them – you’ll be well on your way to having a Microsoft Teams outage totally under control. Your organization now relies on Teams for nearly every aspect of business communication and collaboration.
As we welcome a new year, many people set goals, refresh their schedules, and look forward to making the most of 2023. At Metricfire, we think it’s important to reflect on the past and plan for the future. So we’re looking forward to creating goals for our company while sticking to our core values. In this article, we’ll briefly cover some of our company goals for 2023, specifically for our culture, our roadmap, and our growth as a company.
ManageEngine ADAudit Plus is a real-time change auditing and reporting software that fortifies your Active Directory (AD) security infrastructure. With over 250 built-in reports, it provides you with granular insights into what’s happening within your AD, such as all changes made to objects and their attributes. This can include changes to users, computers, groups, network shares, and more.
There are many factors making networking both more complicated and more critical than ever. The advent of cloud infrastructure, web-based applications, and increasingly diverse network environments demand a new approach to network operations, or NetOps, as it’s referred to in the industry. Networks are bigger than ever: they now connect everything ranging from automobiles to cloud servers.
Want to find the best web monitoring service? You’ve come to the right place. There is no one-size-fits-all monitoring service for every business, so it’s important to do your research and see all the options you have. The worst part about that? You have to do the research with your precious time. The good news? We’ve done the research so you can have a place to start in your journey. Determining the best web monitoring services requires research into important factors.
In an earlier blog post, Log monitoring and unstructured log data, moving beyond tail -f, we talked about collecting and working with unstructured log data. We learned that it’s very easy to add data to the Elastic Stack. So far the only parsing we did was to extract the timestamp from this data, so older data gets backfilled correctly. We also talked about searching this unstructured data toward the end of the blog.
Providing an intuitive user experience that caters to your audience’s needs is essential for your business. By combining APM and RUM, you can help eliminate application issues and give your users a seamless experience. Combining APM and RUM helps you look at both the front-end and back-end of your application, find and fix issues. Don’t quite know what APM and RUM are? Let’s take a closer look.
As we get ready to wish the term SASE a happy 4th birthday, it seems odd that there is still a great deal of confusion in the market about what SASE really is and how it relates to a ‘Zero Trust’ architecture. For many, SASE is a framework for secure network design; for others, it’s seen more as an architectural approach to delivering Zero Trust. So why do we have this confusion when Gartner defined SASE back in 2019?
By incorporating observability into your stack, you can better understand how your complex infrastructure operates, reduce downtime, and empower developers to quickly identify and fix problems. However, it now takes considerably more work, time, and money to build up observability for your infrastructure and applications. Over half of the firms polled employ eight or more observability solutions, according to a 2022 Splunk survey.
A lot is expected of automation in IT environments in the next few years. By 2024 Gartner predicts IT automation will drive a 20% reduction in unplanned downtime and lower operational costs by 30%. At the same time, the efficiencies generated by IT automation and analytics will allow organizations to refocus 30% of their IT operations management resources from support to “continuous engineering.”
As mentioned in our documentation, Cribl Stream is built on a shared-nothing architecture. Each Worker Node and its processes operate separately and independently. This means that the state is not shared across processes or nodes.This means that if we have a large data set we need to access across all worker processes, we have to get creative. There are two main ways of doing this: In this blog, we’ll walk through how to deploy a Stream leader, Stream worker, and Redis containers via Docker.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that enables users to easily run, manage and scale containers on AWS. With ECS, you can deploy containers either on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances or on AWS Fargate, a serverless computing engine for containers. In this article, we’ll look at how these two launch types compare and explore how to start using them.
To get the best performance out of your Kubernetes cluster, SREs and software engineers must have enough knowledge and instruments to find misconfiguration and bottlenecks. At the same time, thanks to Kubernetes’ ever-growing popularity, there is a global shortage of expertise on the platform.
A common mistake IT organizations make, is having a well-designed Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), but at the same time having client devices, such as monitoring agents for your Citrix NetScalers, which accept to set up any encrypted connection, to any device, no matter what certificate they are presenting. In this case, you basically allow connections to be made to devices you do not know whether they can be trusted. This makes you vulnerable for 'spoofing'.
Nothing is more important than a healthy, functioning website. It is essential to monitor your website to make sure it remains functioning, fast, and available to your customers. For example, imagine your website goes down and you aren’t aware of it for another hour. How much business could you lose in that time? Or worse, what long-term damage could it do to your brand reputation?
How to set Service Level Objectives with 3 steps guide.
The primary DNS server hosting a zone or multiple zones acts as an authoritative DNS through which DNS administrators manage zone files and perform DNS changes like adding, deleting, and updating DNS records.
This article was priginally published on the CNF blog and is written by Cameron Pavey. Scroll down for the author’s bio. Docker is an increasingly popular choice for businesses dealing with containerized applications. However, as with any new technology, Docker introduces complexities that need to be managed. Some of these complexities relate to infrastructure and application monitoring.
Application performance monitoring (APM) solutions are essential for any business looking to manage its operations efficiently. By providing real-time insights into the performance of your applications, APM solutions can help you quickly identify areas that need improvement and prevent costly mistakes from occurring in the future. But with so many different types of APM solutions on the market today, how do you know which one is right for your company?
In November 2021, we announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft to develop a Microsoft Azure managed service that lets customers run Grafana natively within their Azure cloud platform. Azure Managed Grafana, which became generally available in August 2022, makes it simple for Azure customers to deploy secure and scalable Grafana instances and connect to open source, cloud, and third-party data sources for visualization and analysis.
In this blog post, we address different websites that will provide all the benefits that were provided by SEO Site Checkup to you with a single click. One of the best free SEO tools, SEO Site Checkup, is no longer offering free website analysis. Isn’t it bad news? But don’t be worried, as there are 10 good alternatives where you can run analysis without paying or even registering. Let’s dive into the detail.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but we think distributed tracing gets a very bad rap for being too complicated and labor-intensive. We’re here to show you three ways you can jumpstart a distributed tracing effort, starting small and expanding as it makes sense. These examples involve only a little code and perhaps a bit of a mindset change. Starting small with distributed tracing can even be fun, because who doesn’t like getting customized results without much work?
I/O wait is a plaguing issue in Linux. Speaking in layman terms, I/O wait is the time taken by the processor (here, CPU) to complete an input service request. Ideally, our CPU doesn't seem to do any work when it is processing one input request at a time, thus the duration between your input and the output provided by the system can be treated as the I/O wait time.
I spent the last few months of 2022 sharing my experience transitioning networks to the cloud, with a focus on spotting and managing some of the associated costs that aren’t always part of the “sticker price” of digital transformation.
With the growing adoption of remote and distributed application development including micro-services, cloud-native applications, serverless, and more, it is becoming challenging more than ever before for developers to troubleshoot issues within a reasonable time, and that is a bottleneck. That in a sense contradicts the objectives of Agile and DevOps through fast feedback loops, continuous delivery, quick MTTR (mean time to resolution of defects), etc.
Managing your own time series database is painful. We’ve moved from servers to services, and yet, monitoring metrics data is primitive. Our managed time series database powers mission-critical workloads for monitoring, at a fraction of the cost.
This is just a quick blog to draw attention to some new and enhanced monitoring dashboards we have added to eG Enterprise in the upcoming release (v 7.2) to provide quick and powerful overviews of a range of AWS services. As with all our dashboards, color-coded overlays provide guided drilldown for help desk operators and administrators. If a component has an issue, an amber or red indicator is overlaid to allow the viewer to click through to further diagnostic information.
Each year of the SRE Report, there’s a trend or anti-pattern that leaps out and makes us pause and reflect. Last year, for example, we found a huge drop in global toil levels. With the whole world working from home for a full year, it made sense that global toil levels would drop, right? But this year, despite the great reopening underway, toil levels dropped even further - it's a paradox, one which no doubt will require its own scrutiny.
Grafana Loki is designed to be cost effective and easy to operate for DevOps and SRE teams, but running queries in Loki can be confusing for those who are new to it. Loki is a horizontally scalable, highly available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. It doesn’t index the content of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream.
We Just celebrated 10 year birthday to Prometheus last month. Prometheus was the second project to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation after Kubernetes in 2016, and has quickly become the de-facto way to monitor Kubernetes workloads. The plug-and-play experience, just putting Prometheus server and starting to see metrics flowing in tagged with Kubernetes labels, was a compelling offer.
A new year has started and I've been pondering my hopes and dreams for the year to come. In the world of SRE, observability is the most prominent pillar of my work. So, I decided to drill into the topic of observability and what I'd like to see happen in the industry in 2023. Rather than focusing on any tool, technology, or methodology, I'lll be exploring concepts that can be broadly applied in any organization.
Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a method of web performance monitoring that captures user experience metrics on visitors to your website. It is also known as real user metrics, end-user experience monitoring, or simply user monitoring. You can think of Real User Monitoring as an automated way to get user feedback on your website. Not every user will complete a survey or fill out a feedback form, but RUM listens to each one of your users.
Without an active SSL certificate, user contact with the website is no longer secured, making it possible for any malicious entity to access private user information. Users are unlikely to return to the website after viewing a security notice, though. The simplest way to monitor the expiration of your site certificates is to use an efficient, automatic SSL certificate expiry monitoring solution.
Only two days into the new year, and we had our first BGP routing leak. It was followed by a couple more in subsequent days. Although these incidents were brief with marginal operational impact on the internet, they are still worth analyzing because they shed light on the cracks in the internet’s routing system.
Elastic Observability 8.6 introduces a set of capabilities improving production operations through the introduction of host (EC2/GCP compute/Azure compute) observability, application dependency operations views (insights into databases, caches, etc), and a new connector for Opsgenie. These new features allow customers to: Elastic Observability 8.6 is available now on Elastic Cloud — the only hosted Elasticsearch offering to include all of the new features in this latest release.
When working with log messages, it’s critical that the timestamp of the log message is accurate. Incorrect timestamps can cause problems when trying to find log messages at a specific date/time or may cause alerts to not function properly. A common cause of incorrect timestamps for log messages is a mismatch of time zones between the log source (device sending the log) and log destination (device receiving the log, such as Graylog).
According to data from W3Techs, more than 40% of all websites are built on WordPress. Therefore, it’s no surprise that WordPress hosting has skyrocketed in popularity recently and hosting providers have proliferated. With so many choices, it’s important to understand just how reliable WordPress hosts are, especially when it comes to downtime. Web hosting downtime can have significant consequences such as business loss, brand damage, and missed opportunities.
Most sentences that include both on premises and cloud usually put the word “or” between them, or perhaps “vs.” But most enterprises operate in the world of “and.” In other words, they have workloads on premises and in the cloud—and that little three-letter word makes a world of difference.
Every Citrix VAD/DaaS engineering team is responsible for a healthy Citrix VAD or DaaS deployment (yes also DaaS). But the most important task is providing great user experience. Is the team sure end users are actually getting that great user experience? Can they prove it? Are they going to be alarmed immediately whenever they are not and find the root cause quickly? Does the team know which users are affected.
Let’s start by stating the obvious: an exception is a problem that occurs during the runtime of a program which disrupts its conventional flow and exception handling is the process of responding to an exception. In Android, not handling an exception will lead to your application crashing and you seeing the dreaded “App keeps stopping” dialog. This makes handling exceptions incredibly important, and let’s face it: no one is going to use an app that continually crashes.
Today we are excited to announce scheduled searches – a new feature on Dashbird that allows you to track any log event across your stack, turn it into time-series metric and also configure alert notifications based on it. This has been one of the most requested features across our users and we are thrilled to make it available for all users starting today.
Microservices are a popular software design architecture that breaks apart monolithic systems. A microservice application is built as a collection of loosely coupled services. Each microservice is responsible for a single feature. They interact with each other via communication protocols such as HTTP.
Observability is a term that has gained a lot of traction in recent years, particularly in the realm of software engineering and DevOps. At its core, observability refers to the ability to gain insight into the internal workings of a system by observing its external outputs. This allows engineers to diagnose and troubleshoot issues with the system, as well as to monitor its performance and behaviour.
VictoriaMetrics is proud to announce that we consider vmbackup and vmbackupmanager to be feature-complete solutions as of release 1.85.3. These backup components are essential for ensuring the safety and integrity of your data, and we have made a number of improvements in recent releases to make them even more reliable and user-friendly.
A look at what Apache Arrow is, how it works, and some of the companies using it as a critical component in their architecture. Over the past few decades, leveraging big datasets required businesses to perform increasingly complex analysis. Advancements in query performance, analytics, and data storage are largely a result of greater access to memory. Demand, manufacturing process improvements, and technological advances all contributed to cheaper memory.
Looking for easy Microsoft Teams troubleshooting? Martello's got your back: https://martellotech.com/solutions/microsoft-teams-issues-monitoring/
A little over a year ago, we released Grafana Machine Learning, enabling Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced users to easily view forecasts of their time series. We recently enhanced Grafana Machine Learning with Outlier Detection, which allows you to monitor a group of similar things, such as load-balanced pods in Kubernetes, and get alerted when something starts behaving differently than its peers.
Monitoring the performance of an application is not a strange concept to most developers. At one point or another, we’ve all had to do some performance debugging of our own. Usually, it happens when there’s a big issue affecting the user’s experience or cost implications. Only then do we make time to look at how the app performs in different scenarios.
Table of Contents When an application written for the Java Virtual Machine is running, it constantly creates new objects and puts them on the heap. Well, at least in the vast majority of the cases. Such objects can have a longer or shorter life, but at some point, they stopped being referenced from the code. Unlike languages like C/C++, we don’t have exact control over when the memory will be freed – freeing the memory is the garbage collector’s job.
Table of Contents Uptime is the metric that measures perhaps the most critical aspect of your business, its availability. If you think about it, having a website that does many really cool things, paying tons of money on ads to bring people to it, and even spending all those hours on making your website look great won’t amount to anything if it doesn’t work.
As your business grows, so will the number of components in your infrastructure, making manual monitoring impossible without the proper tools. Be it performance metrics, availability status, or application component logs, you need a tool that provides end-to-end visibility into the health of your infrastructure. To help you get started, we’ll compare some of the best infrastructure monitoring tools and software, both open source and paid, available today.
Table of Contents Setting up and administering multiple servers for business and application purposes has become easier thanks to advancements in cloud technology. Today, enterprises are choosing to operate large numbers of servers both in the cloud and in their data centers to meet the ever-increasing demand. As a result of these changes, monitoring technologies have become crucial. In this post, we’ll explore the best server monitoring tools and software currently on the market.
We are thrilled to kick start 2023 with an exciting announcement: Slight Reliability is now a part of SquaredUp! Keep reading to learn how this partnership began, in an exclusive interview snippet with our CEO Richard Benwell and Slight Reliability host Stephen Townshend.
DevOps has evolved in terms of its tools, techniques, and culture. Software developers can gain a completely new perspective when operations and development work together. The tech sector now depends heavily on DevOps. It is essential in enterprises, from software delivery to project planning. Businesses in DevOps employ a variety of monitoring tools for a range of activities, including development, testing, and automation.
https://www.2steps.io/
Hybrid work has made Synthetic Monitoring vastly more important because in this home environment – devices can be unpredictable and hence impact employee productivity.
David Calvert is a site reliability engineer working remotely from the south of France. He’s currently focused on observability, reliability, and security aspects of cloud infrastructure. You can find him as dotdc on GitHub and @0xDC_ on Twitter. Over the past three years, I’ve built and operated Kubernetes clusters for two different companies — the first one on-premises, and the second on a public cloud platform for my current job at Powder.
A good developer knows how to debug code. In fact, most software engineers spend the majority of their time debugging existing code rather than writing new code. When it comes to native app development, debugging and tracking errors during development can be a tricky task. So, in this post, I’ll help you understand how you can debug your React Native applications and also track errors during app development.
With vSphere and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), VMware enables enterprise organizations to combine the economic advantages of virtual machines (VMs) with the agility, portability, and scalability provided by Kubernetes. vSphere is VMware’s platform for the provisioning and management of VMs.
Around 57% of data breaches are attributed to poor patch management. This stat clearly attributes to the need for patch management to keep the organization safe by mitigating security vulnerabilities. Without the right patch management software, it becomes difficult for organizations to identify critical updates. Only implementing a patch management process is not enough for any organization to win the game.
The second decade of the 21st century witnessed an unprecedented paradigm shift in the educational sphere. With the onset of the pandemic, conventional ideas of an educational institution gave way to a far modernized and on-the-go approach. Joining class and listening to teachers’ lectures on Zoom or through Microsoft Teams is now the new norm.
Anyone who is trying to set up monitoring for multiple machines knows how tough it can get to manage multiple Grafana Agents across them. To make things easier, we recently added the Grafana Agent role to the Grafana Ansible collection, which will help users manage the Agent across multiple Linux hosts. (Need to know how to get started with the Grafana Ansible collection for Grafana Cloud?
Kubernetes is a game-changer for enterprise organizations. Automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications allows organizations to embrace a cloud-native paradigm at scale and more easily employ best practices, such as microservices and DevSecOps. But as with all tech, Kubernetes has its limits. Kelsey Hightower famously tweeted that “Kubernetes is a platform for building platforms. It’s a better place to start; not the endgame.”
Check our December 2022 health report on the top most popular cloud providers. We analyze the health of the cloud providers based on the number of outages and problems during the month. The source of the data is made available by the cloud providers themselves via their status page. We normalize it and use it to generate the report.
This article was originally published in The New Stack and is reposted here with permission. Arrow makes analytics workloads more efficient for modern CPU and GPU hardware, which makes working with large data sets easier and less costly. One of the biggest challenges of working with big data is the performance overhead involved with moving data between different tools and systems as part of your data processing pipeline.
Brick by brick, block by block—if you’ve been with us throughout our Author’s Cut blog series (and if you haven’t, you can go catch up), you’ve seen us build the case for observability from the ground up. We’ve covered structured events, the core analysis loop, and use cases for managing applications in production—and that’s just to start.
2022 saw a return to normalcy on the Covid front as offices re-opened, people gathered in large groups indoors again and mask mandates waned, even as Covid never really went away. Meanwhile, inflation raged through the summer months before subsiding somewhat later in the year and the Great Resignation gave way to mass layoffs, especially in the tech industry.
Trust is everything. It is the glue that builds the lasting relationship between you and your customers, and it depends on a variety of factors like customer service, product quality, and user experience. A large part of your customer’s experience is from their interaction with your website. So, if your website is not meeting their expectations, you can lose them as customers.
Are you just getting started with Cribl Stream? Or maybe you’re well on your way to becoming a certified admin through our Cribl Certified Observability Engineer certification offered by Cribl University. Regardless, using Cribl Stream to send data from one source to many destinations is something you’ll want to try. So if you’re ready, read on!
In our latest comparison guide for 2023, we'll cover all of the best IT infrastructure monitoring software that you should consider using to maintain uptime and improve your system’s performance.
It is no surprise that cybercriminals are after the money, and banks have plenty lying around. They also have gobs of data, making banks irresistible to hackers who have a field day attacking complex banking IT systems flush with more connections than a movie agent. Here are a few recent facts to know.
If you are working with large amounts of data that will primarily be used for analytics, a column database might be a good option. There are a lot of different options when it comes to choosing a database for your application. A common discussion seems to be the high-level SQL vs. NoSQL database argument of whether data should be stored in a relational database or in a NoSQL alternative like key-value, document or graph databases.
You need ways to bring your distributed teams together. That’ll be one of the reasons that you chose Microsoft Teams. It’s a brilliant comms and collaboration platform for connecting your people. But, when it comes to classic telephony, does it stand up to the competition? Basically, yes. And here’s how. To be able to use Teams for traditional corporate telephony, businesses must link their Microsoft Phone System to a virtual PBX hosted by Microsoft in the cloud.
Curious about Splunk® Universal Forwarders? This article will sum up what they are, why to use them and how the universal forwarder works. Importantly, we’ll point you to the very best tips, tricks and resources on using universal forwarders (and other ways) to get data into Splunk.
In 2017, Just Eat Takeaway.com (JET) was transitioning from a scrappy startup to a surging scaleup. With a global customer base and workforce, the food delivery marketplace’s front line teams needed to scale the real-time monitoring of the platform. Their initial efforts looked like “NASA’s mission control with Grafana dashboards,” said Senior Technology Manager Alex Murray.
As we begin the new year, it is customary to reflect and identify areas we can continue to grow in 2023. Whether it’s joining the local gym, starting a new diet, or taking up a new hobby, this time is always full of promise to continually improve. The same can be said for digital businesses of every size and across every vertical. Macroeconomic trends have especially made this time one of reflection for a number of organizations.
For the last few years, the entire networking industry has focused on analytics and mining more and more information out of the network. This makes sense because of all the changes in networking over the last decade. Changes like network overlays, public cloud, applications delivered as a service, and containers mean we need to pay attention to much more diverse information out there.
Application performance monitoring (APM) solutions are a crucial tool for modern software companies in 2023. They offer invaluable insights into application performance, including response times, error rates, and more. But are they worth the investment? In this article, we'll dive deep into the economics of application monitoring, including the costs, benefits, and potential ROI.
Do your cron jobs (aka scheduled jobs) ever fail or not run as expected? Scheduled jobs are supposed to be predictable – as the name implies. But as with many things, predictable!= reliable. Cron jobs fail too and we think you should know when that happens, Crons allows you to monitor the uptime and performance of any scheduled, recurring job in Sentry. Once set up, you’ll get alerts and metrics to help you solve errors, detect timeouts, and prevent disruptions to your service.
As your environment changes, new trends can quickly make your existing monitoring less accurate. At the same time, building alerts after every new incident can turn a straightforward strategy into a convoluted one. Treating monitoring as a one-time or reactive effort can both result in alert fatigue. Alert fatigue occurs when an excessive number of alerts are generated by monitoring systems or when alerts are irrelevant or unhelpful, leading to a diminished ability to see critical issues.
We are thrilled to announce that ManageEngine has been recognized as a Customers’ Choice in the 2022 Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Application Performance Monitoring and Observability report for the fourth time in a row. “We believe this recognition is a testament to our customer-first mentality. For us, appreciation from our customers is one of the greatest compliments we can receive.
Out with the old and in with the new? Yes and no. Although 2022 may have been an interesting year for the global website monitoring market, many of the trends that dominated this year will likely carry over into 2023. Here’s a peek at how some of the top website monitoring trends of the year will likely impact security, network infrastructures and user experience going into 2023.
They say change is good. But in IT operations, change is also the number one cause of outages. According to the Uptime Institute, 49% of all service outages are attributed to configuration and change management errors. That's a lot of avoidable headaches. And because errors often have downstream effects, it may not be obvious what caused an outage, resulting in prolonged downtime that affects revenue-generating business services, results in service level agreement (SLA) penalties, and causes a loss of customer trust. And those costs add up quickly. Gartner figures the meter for an average downtime event runs at $5,600 per minute.
Bandwidth monitoring provides IT administrators with the assurance that the network has sufficient capacity to run business-critical applications. In addition, network ops team have end-to-end visibility to identify network hogs that cause the congestion. Typically, when a single component overloads in any network, it can bring the entire operation to its knees and impact the employee digital experience. For example, even if you may have a dedicated service plan from your ISP, employees will end up complaining about issues like large file transfer time and slower applications.
Whether you’re a DevOps, SRE, or just a data driven individual, you’re probably addicted to dashboards and metrics. We look at our metrics to see how our system is doing, whether on the infrastructure, the application or the business level. We trust our metrics to show us the status of our system and where it misbehaves. But do our metrics show us what really happened? You’d be surprised how often it’s not the case.
Web performance greatly influences the user experience through engagement with your brand and impression of your products. For example, page speed is directly proportional to how long people stay on a site. As a result, there’s much more demand for network optimization on modern devices, including AR, IoT, cloud drives, and mobile apps. When your network stretches across hundreds of locations, the server ends up receiving the output from tons of clients at the same time.
When we talk about the business value of a tool or a system that at first glance may seem like a “nice to have” or a “helpful but not absolutely necessary” technology, it is a good idea to start any discussion on the merits of the tool by putting some things into perspective.
A cron job is used to schedule and carry out specific tasks. It automates the process and periodically executes it in the background. You can keep track of whether a given cron job is running or not with the help of a cron job monitoring tool. You must first configure a cron job in the monitoring tool before you can monitor it. After then, the tool checks the status regularly and notifies you when a problem occurs. This article lists the top 10 tools for online cron job monitoring.
When visitors come to your website to browse products, make purchases, or read your articles, you need to consider how they will feel. Furthermore, a website that loads slowly and experiences frequent breakdowns must be avoided because it can turn visitors away. Your sales, revenue, and profitability may suffer as a result. Additionally, it could harm your reputation, particularly if the visitor is fresh. If they have a bad first impression, they will quickly pursue other options.
For the team at JPMorgan Chase, the daily stakes of having a stable system are high. “We are in the business of making sure that trades are executed, and systems are stable and up and running for a positive client experience,” said Askari Imam, VP, Asset Wealth Management (Product and Integration Delivery).
InsightFinder is a SaaS platform that uses AI-backed predictive analytics to predict and prevent production incidents. Using InsightFinder with Datadog, you can quickly identify hidden correlations in your application metrics, logs, and events and address application issues before they devolve into production outages and create customer impact.
Having a deep understanding of a Kubernetes cluster is important: the right insights allow you to monitor the performance and health of the cluster, which is necessary for ensuring that applications are running smoothly and that any potential issues can be identified and addressed quickly. As your Kubernetes cluster develops, so does the need for monitoring and troubleshooting.
With the shift from traditional monolithic applications to the distributed microservices of DevOps, there is a need for a similar change in operational security policies. For example, how do you secure a disparate number of micro-systems operating with multiple access credentials across a multi-level organization? DevSecOps (Devops security) answers this question by integrating security at every level of your development process.
Dashboards are powerful tools for monitoring and troubleshooting your system. Too often, however, we run into an incident, jump to the dashboard, just to find ourselves drowning in endless data and unable to find what we need. This could be caused not just by the data overload, but also due to seeing too many or too few colors, inconsistent conventions or the lack of visual cues.
As businesses are planning for 2023, many are adopting a more conservative mindset when it comes to their resources. In light of the recent market fluctuations and the uncertainty of if and how a recession will affect them, they are looking for ways to cut costs and increase their efficiency. But despite the spending slowdown, development velocity can’t slow down.
