Having quick access to metrics and health signals from your AWS environment is paramount to identifying issues expediently and monitoring the effects of any deployed fixes. Datadog is proud to partner with AWS for the launch of CloudWatch Metric Streams, a new feature that allows AWS users to forward metrics from key AWS services to different endpoints, including Datadog, via Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose with low latency.

All too frequently system administrators and developers need to keep an eye on critical signals generated by their production systems. However, if these signals are highly specific in nature, tracking them can be tough. Most monitoring systems stick to tracking standard metrics emitted by servers hosting applications. But what happens if you need to monitor a number of specific customers that have signed up in the last hour and custom metrics?

In this latest consideration guide created to assist IT operators in which tools they choose for a range of different processes and activities, we’ve gathered a range of insights from some of our favourite specialists to take you through the essentials tools of configuration management. Configuration management is a systems engineering practise that ensures consistency of the configuration supporting both software and hardware of a company or product.

Advertising tycoon David Ogilvy famously remarked, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Replace the word “half” with “one-third” and “advertising” with “public cloud” and you’d describe what enterprises are grappling with right now. They know that not all of the cloud resources they’re paying for are being used, but they don’t know which ones those are.

At Cloudsmith, we strive hard to ensure that private Cloudsmith repositories work with any build and release process that our customers use. Our mission is to be the universal package management solution that any modern DevOps workflow requires.

While containers are known for their multiple benefits for the enterprise, one should be aware of the complexity they carry, especially in large scale production environments. Having to deploy, reboot, upgrade or apply patches to patches to hundreds and hundreds of containers is no easy feat, even for experienced IT teams. Different types of Kubernetes solutions have emerged to address this issue.

Your business seeks a high-performance, flexible, cost-effective, and more secure alternative to Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS). Welcome to software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs)! An improvement over legacy dedicated MPLS circuits, SD-WAN solutions deliver easily manageable networks with a high quality of service (QoS). Yet, your IT team tells you that SD-WANs aren’t cloud-optimized or mobile-device friendly.

In my last post (read here), we saw how CloudHedge enables enterprises to execute the transformation of WebSphere ND on Linux Apps to WebSphere Liberty Container in a non-intrusive way. As an addition to the previous post, this one talks about transforming WebSphere ND on AIX to WebSphere Liberty containers using CloudHedge’s App Modernization platform.

CircleCI has released new Arm-based compute in preview. Arm processors and architectures are becoming widely available as development teams adopt them as compute nodes in many application infrastructures. Organizations that need to run microservices, application servers, databases, and other workloads in a cost-effective way will continue to turn to the Arm architecture.

Patching vulnerabilities can be daunting, especially if the information is confusing, and the process to deploy patches is long. There are going to be times where a zero day presents itself, and the vulnerability requires immediate action. Whether it’s a simple fix or not, the seriousness of some vulnerabilities can put organizations at risk. Deploying patches, especially for critical infrastructure, takes planning.

This hands-on Flux tutorial explores how Flux can be used at the end of your continuous integration pipeline to deploy your applications to Kubernetes clusters.

Circonus’ time-series database, IRONdb, can ingest, compute, and analyze time-series data at greater volume and frequency than any other solution in the market. We realize that’s a bold statement, but we stand by it. In fact, IRONdb can ingest over a trillion measurements per second, giving companies the data granularity they need for better, more accurate monitoring. It also offers unlimited scalability and the highest data safety guarantees.

We're very proud to announce that we have been accepted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a conformant Certified Kubernetes provider for our v1.20 Civo Kubernetes product based on K3s. Every small business starts with a goal of competing with the big fish of the industry, and a huge part of that is having the certification to prove you're providing a compatible service. We're now in the company of some really inspirational organisations...

Speedscale ‘SpeedChat’ Episode 2: Shift-Left vs. Shift-Right Throwdown featuring Nate Lee (Founder, Speedscale), Ken Ahrens (Founder, Speedscale) and Jason English (Principal Analyst, Intellyx).

Topology is a multilayered map showing how everything in the IT environment is related. It's similar to Google Maps, which gives you a bird's eye view into an area and how everything is interconnected. Also, in Google Maps, you can see how traffic is flowing and which intersections may be causing bottlenecks. A view into topology allows similar visibility. You can see how components of an IT system are laid out to interact with each other.

If memory serves (it was over 20 years ago), that’s what the free t-shirt that Microsoft gave me for being an official Windows 98 beta tester said. And yes, being a beta volunteer required me to haul my desktop PC to Redmond, WA (from Seattle)…because…I guess that’s how it was done back then? I remember they gave us pizza, and I needed to install more RAM. As I said before, it was a while ago; however, the whole “change is inevitable” thing is still valid today.

In today’s digital landscape, users expect applications to be available at all times and developers are expected to deploy new versions of these applications several times a day. Both of these expectations can be met by upgrading your Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes is constantly getting new features and security updates, so your Kubernetes cluster needs to be kept up-to-date as well.

Kubernetes orchestrates clusters of machines to run container-based workloads. Building on the success of the container-based development model, it provides the tools to operate containers reliably at scale. The container-based development methodology is popular outside just the realm of open source and Linux though.

Now that you are starting to build your FinOps team and slowly changing your organizational culture, it’s time to start putting the teams to work - TOGETHER! In this blog I will provide you with some tools and processes to get you started.

Fastly is an edge cloud platform that includes a content delivery network (CDN), as well as services for image optimization, video streaming, cloud security, and load balancing. These services are supported by a network of caches in different locations, which enables enterprise-scale companies to deliver applications to users as quickly as possible, even in times of peak traffic.

No one can deny the importance of a proper monitoring system for the effective management of IT infrastructure. You need the most efficient solutions and monitoring tools to optimize performance, make the most out of your resources, and be able to deal with errors and failure conditions. While the traditional way of IT monitoring involves the use of reports, it does have certain limitations.

We often encounter companies who are end-customers of a Cloud MSP (Managed Service Provider) and/or reseller of AWS products and services. In these cases, the end-customer may not have access to the AWS Management Account because the MSP owns it and restricts access for security reasons.

Apache Cordova, since its release in 2009, has created a paradigm shift for mobile application development. Before Cordova, only developers who knew platform dedicated languages for a particular type of mobile operating system could develop native mobile applications. There was Objective-C for developing iOS apps, or Java for Android apps and platforms like Blackberry. Windows Phone also had languages dedicated to building their mobile applications.

DevOps tool of the month is a series, where each month I will introduce one new useful DevOps tool in 2021 For March I chose: Shipa – Shipa’s cloud native application management framework makes working with Kubernetes for developers extremely easy.

FireHydrant uses a CLI for some developer actions, called fhd (FireHydrant developers). Previously, we might have distributed workflows among new developers by having them copy/paste or clone scripts down to their machines--but Crystal lets us encapsulate shared tooling in a compiled binary. This way, we have a CLI that developers can install quickly, and that works seamlessly with our other tools.

Software development by distributed teams is nothing new. But since 2020, it’s no longer just teams that are globally dispersed, it is the individual team members themselves. Remote working is the new normal. So in this unpredictable, “modern” world we’re in, how do you put together a solution that delivers for every single team member, no matter their location?

Following the Open Operator Collection announcement from November, Canonical is today proud to announce the availability of Juju Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) 2.9. This new release of Juju brings new capabilities for Kubernetes operators as well as smooth integration with the Open Operator Collection.

Did you know that the VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront engineering team not only listens to input from customers, but acts on that input to improve the overall Tanzu Observability experience? In fact, as a direct result of customer surveys, the Wavefront engineering team recently completed 30 days of improvement focused on query quality. I will quickly run through those improvements in this post.

During the next seven weeks, our team will work to improve the overall experience of Qovery. We gathered all your feedback (thank you to our wonderful community 🙏), and we decided to make significant changes to make Qovery a better place to deploy and manage your apps. This series will reveal all the changes and features you will get in the next major release of Qovery. Let's go!

Argo Rollouts is a progressive delivery controller created for Kubernetes. It allows you to deploy your application with minimal/zero downtime by adopting a gradual way of deploying instead of taking an “all at once” approach.

A floor of commotion bustling with people holding phones and shouting out purchase and sell orders, some using hand signals to communicate over the noise. This was a common scene on Wall Street in the 1980s. Nowadays, transactions happen at the push of a button with traders sitting directly in front of a computer. In fact, the computer has made it possible to automate the buying and selling of securities, leading to an era of high-frequency, algorithmic trading.

March 1, 2020, was a Sunday. I was getting ready for a work trip to San Francisco. Just before heading to the Berlin airport, I checked my phone. There was a text from my boss: Hey Lena, trying all channels. Don’t fly. I didn’t fly that day and I haven’t flown since. Two days later, as planned, I went from interim to permanent VP of Product Engineering at CircleCI. At the same time, Europe was going into lockdown, then the world went into lockdown.

Modern applications are interdependent on different devices and servers. If you are not familiar with your software structure, you will encounter problems when you make changes within your application. To prevent this, you need to observe application discovery and dependency mapping (ADDM).

The key to maximizing revenues and ensuring foolproof security is to actively monitor infrastructure. With virtualization growing increasingly, virtual machine or VM performance monitoring is one of the most crucial parts of infrastructure monitoring. This is because as opposed to a physical server or machine, detecting problems in a VM can be even more challenging.

As we develop and deploy cloud compute automation and optimization solutions here at Spot by NetApp, we use various tools to improve our day-to-day operations. In this post I’ll share how we’ve found Terraform Cloud from Hashicorp to be quite helpful with deployment management.

Wouldn’t it be handy to quickly spin up a Kubernetes cluster for CI testing, on-demand? Interested? If so, read on! Here at Codefresh, many of our customers develop Kubernetes-native applications. A common CI task is to create a Kubernetes cluster to test out deployment processes and integrations. Often, such tests can be greatly simplified if this cluster is ephemeral – that is, it is created on-demand for each build of a test pipeline.

March 25th, 2021 – Canonical, Collabora and Nextcloud announce the immediate availability of a content collaboration platform for 64bit ARM for both consumers and enterprises. Building on the prior Nextcloud Ubuntu Appliance it adds with Collabora Online, the first viable self-hosted web office solution on the popular Raspberry Pi 4 platform.

When starting a cloud migration project, one of the most important and often challenging parts is to have an accurate understanding of what you are trying to migrate. Over time, companies start new projects, which means creating new infrastructure, adding servers, databases, etc. This is a normal part of the development cycle. However, despite best efforts, inventories get out of sync.

Security remains a consistent priority for cloud providers to ensure that customers are always protected, data is secure and applications are safe. Users of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) are provided with ways to maintain the integrity of the compute instances that applications are running on top of.

Monitoring the current state and performance of applications is critical for IT Ops and DevOps teams alike. Understanding the health of an application is one of the most effective ways of anticipating potential bottlenecks or slowdowns, yet it’s one of the largest challenges faced by many organizations that build and deploy software. This is largely due to applications’ distributed and diversified nature.

“What is GitOps?” – a question which has seen increasing popularity on Google searches and blog posts in the last three years. If you want to know why then read on. Quite simply, the coining of GitOps is credited to one individual, and pretty smart guy, Alexis Richardson. He’s so smart that he’s built a multi-award-winning consultancy, Weaveworks, and a bespoke product, Flux, around the GitOps concept.

Programming is often thought of purely as a problem-solving activity. This may be true for the lone coder in their garage, but in the multi-person environment of an Agile team, such problem solving must be collaborative. In this article, we’ll look at the role of communication in software development, particularly in an Agile framework. Covid-19 has forced an unprecedented shift to remote working so we’ll finish up with a discussion of how Agile can be implemented in a remote setting.

With the new Contexts API release, developers can save their team valuable time while enhancing security practices. We know maintaining your organization’s security is crucial. There is the need to meet strict compliance guidelines, such as FedRAMP and GDPR, and what seems to be an increasing number of breaches, like the compromise of over 150,000 video security cameras as a result of a targeted Jenkins server.

Running an Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure on premise has major challenges like high capex and requires internal expertise. It can provide a lot of benefits for organisations that want to establish an AI strategy. The solution outlined in this post illustrates the power and the utility of the universal Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) using Juju, a universal OLM, to create and manage on premise AI infrastructure.

Over the past few months, we’ve been working on some major updates to Circonus — a new dashboard builder and interface along with several turnkey service dashboards. In the following post, we’ll share the motivation and process behind this project, then walk you through what you can expect. Circonus has provided the ability to create custom drag and drop dashboards for some time. However, this feature was added several years ago.

It can be really exciting when your development team is growing fast! But then you soon realize that managing all the developer tools to constantly create new projects or add users is becoming a full-time job. Well, not anymore. At least, not for Rollbar. We’re releasing our HashiCorp Terraform Verified Provider for Rollbar today, built in partnership with HashiCorp.

D2iQ Konvoy provides controls to easily upgrade Kubernetes itself, Kubernetes add-ons, like Prometheus, or the Konvoy CLI independently. Best of all, upgrades can be performed in place without disruption. This tutorial will cover how to upgrade node pools, or specify the upgrade based on specific node pools. We’ll also walk through how to upgrade in parallel, or specify the number of concurrent nodes to upgrade. To get started, take a look at the cluster config.

After we’d fixed Aparna’s network issue, James came to see me at my desk. Masks on, socially distanced and all that, but it was nice to have some face-to-face time. James is cool – that dry British humor and not your classic IT Ops dude. He’s been here forever and mentored me when the CIO, Charlie, hired me as the first SRE here a year or so ago. I lucked out really.

The term cloud native is widely used when thinking about computing and software development, encompassing a wide range of concepts that are regularly used in technology. Let’s break it down and take a closer look – what does cloud native really mean?

Customer Profile One of the top 10 largest financial services companies in the world 200,000+ employees worldwide. Serving tens of millions of customers. With operations in more than 60 countries, the Interlink Incident Alert Management app serves an audience of thousands of service owners and business stakeholders - across 20+ global markets

One of the most powerful aspects of AWS is their Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. The obvious aspect of its power is that it controls who can do what with all the resources inside your AWS account. But the non-obvious side is how configurable it is. You can encode permissions that are so finely grained that a Lambda Function could, for example, be given just enough permissions to be able to read one attribute from one record for the current user of a DynamoDB Table.

Without version control systems like git, life as a developer would be very different. It is the center of modern collaborative approaches to development. But how does it work? You know...under the hood? In this piece, Julie Kent gives us a guided tour.

It’s with immense pride and excitement we can announce that Civo is coming out of beta! When we planned out our beta program, which we called #KUBE100, our first priority was getting real-world feedback from a wide range of developers, all at various stages in their Kubernetes journey. We wanted to create a Kubernetes platform that plugged the gaps we saw in the industry – speed of deployment, ease of use, and a simple billing model.

Server 3.x, which is now available to all CircleCI customers, was designed to meet the strictest security, compliance, and regulatory restraints. This self-hosted solution can scale under heavy workloads, all within your team’s Kubernetes cluster on your private network, but with the dynamically scaling cloud experience of CircleCI. Offering an exceptional on-premise service means keeping that service up-to-date with the latest releases.

Containers have revolutionized how we distribute applications by allowing replicated test environments, portability, resource efficiency, scalability and unmatched isolation capabilities. While containers help us package applications for easier deployment and updating, we need a set of specialized tools to manage them.

Most applications begin with a small to medium-sized user base. Even with migration projects, you would not immediately open your new application to the entire existing user base. Instead, you would first test with some internal users, then open up to early adopters. Nevertheless, if your application is successful, at some point you will face the need to scale it. Nevertheless, if your application is successful, at some point you will face the need to scale it.

The hype of 5G is ushering in the potential for drastic network change and is driving service providers to prepare for the future. Today’s networks provide ubiquitous all-purpose IP connectivity to support all services.

COVID-19 certainly accelerated some trends. For example, in my view, COVID-19 accelerated the pace and progress of digital transformation by five to 10 years, as companies faced the need to adapt to a post-COVID-19 world, involving permanently the higher adoption of remote work, remote education, and digital touch-points. Technologies requiring less human touch and more digital touch-points will be adopted faster in the aftermath of COVID-19.

Keeping up with customer demand and staying ahead of the competition requires fast releases and efficient code. This is where DevOps comes into play. Where DevOps is the practice, mindset, and culture of combining software development (i.e. Dev) and IT operations (i.e. Ops) to accelerate the development lifecycle and provide continuous delivery without compromising quality.

During the next eight weeks, our team will work to improve the overall experience of Qovery. We gathered all your feedback (thank you to our wonderful community 🙏), and we decided to make significant changes to make Qovery a better place to deploy and manage your apps. This series will reveal all the changes and features you will get in the next major release of Qovery. Let's go! Read the previous article: The Future of Qovery - Week #2.

The transition to virtualized infrastructure and software network functions requires a re-evaluation in the telecom production environments. Network function is not alone. It has always been an important piece in the puzzle but requires a set of non-functional bits to complete the big picture and which brings the lifecycle management of network functions to the discussion.

In almost every case, APIs have changed how modern applications connect to their data. Mobile apps, single-page web apps, IoT devices, integration hooks between software—all of these things rely on APIs to fetch, update, delete, and create data. In fact, one set of APIs might serve as the backbone of a website, mobile app, voice assistant device, and more, meaning one data store owns a treasure trove of information about us, the human users.

Speedscale ‘SpeedChat’ Episode 1: Discussing software product management, ‘dogfooding’ and scaling quickly for product/market fit without breaking things.

It has been eight years since The Phoenix Project was published and a lot has changed since then! I started to think about what we’ve learned in that time. It starts with the theory of constraints. I still see it all the time. Organizations take actions which are merely temporary, putting out fires but not solving for the underlying causes of those fires.

We recently launched the public preview of a new tool that lets anyone dashboard anything – for free. Meet Dashboard Server! You can download it free because we wanted to get our incredible dashboards in the hands of more people. The SCOM community know us well but our dashboards are perfect for so many use cases beyond System Center monitoring. And if you love them as much as we think you will, all we ask in return is that you share that love by spreading the word.

Circonus’ new Linux host monitoring dashboard is the most comprehensive host monitoring available in the market – yet also extremely easy to install and use, allowing users to more efficiently and accurately monitor their Linux hosts and diagnose and resolve issues. The turnkey dashboard uses our new Circonus Unified Agent (CUA) – a single collection agent that consolidates all host and services monitoring.

Let’s take a moment and think about security in your organization. Security is often separate from other engineering teams such as development, operations, networking, IT, and so forth. If you narrow down your focus to specifically releasing new software or features and functions in existing software, you’ll find that while development and operations are working together very quickly and efficiently, they’re still vaulting these functions and features over to security.

D2iQ Konvoy simplifies the deployment on Azure by providing a command line interface to automate the deployment and operations of Kubernetes clusters all in one place. In this tutorial, we’ll show you the provisioning of an enterprise-grade Kubernetes cluster on Azure using a single command. Before we get started, let’s talk about a few prerequisites you’ll need: First, download the D2iQ Konvoy installer and authenticate it to your Azure account.

As we wrap up the first quarter of 2021, we wanted to talk about things we should be doing as part of a cloud native strategy for the remaining 3/4 of the year. Moving from traditional monolithic. architectures to a modern microservices approach has many benefits, but still has the greater majority of us baffled in terms of tapping into its full potential.

And that was February! A month where a rover showed what perseverance means and a small drone what ingenuity looks like. February will be remembered as the month where two robots landed on Mars, telling us all to “dare mighty things”.

Unifying three distinct teams—development, security, and operations—around a common approach to get application releases to production is challenging. This post explores how Tanzu Labs partnered with a major branch of the Department of Defense (DoD) to build an automated DevSecOps process using VMware Tanzu and several open source tools.

Keeping your distributed systems running smoothly has never been easy. To that end, Healthwatch for VMware Tanzu created an “out of the box” option for tracking the health of your app platform. The module proved to be a big upgrade from homegrown monitoring toolchains. Platform teams have since come to rely on Healthwatch’s curated indicators, alerts, and visualizations.

If you are a .NET developer, monitoring runtime metrics can help you troubleshoot bugs and detect resource inefficiencies in your applications. With Datadog, you can easily collect, visualize, and alert on key .NET runtime metrics, including exceptions, garbage collection statistics, thread count, and more. We have fully integrated .NET runtime metrics into Datadog APM so that you can easily view them alongside your distributed traces, logs, and other telemetry.

When running AKS clusters, ideally you want the compute infrastructure to adapt to your Kubernetes workload and not the other way around. VMs should automatically match your application requirements all the time without labor-intensive, hands-on management, and of course, your Azure bill should be as low-cost as possible. However, in trying to achieve this ideal, AKS and Kubernetes users in general, still face significant operational challenges.

It’s been six years since Kubernetes v1.0 was released in 2015, and since then it’s become a critical technology foundation to deploy modern, cloud native applications with speed, develop them with agility and scale them with flexibility. With a fast-maturing ecosystem, advancements in tooling are making it possible for a new wave of applications to be deployed on Kubernetes.

Take the 2021 State of DevOps Survey here. This year marks the 10-year anniversary of our industry-defining State of DevOps research. You’d think after 10 years that there wouldn’t be much more to say about DevOps, but practices and technologies continue to evolve, the best keep getting better, and we keep unearthing new topics to research.

This Logz.io Infrastructure Monitoring tutorial will cover how to get started with our latest product, our new Prometheus-as-a-Service metrics solution that’s based on Prometheus. Engineers monitor metrics to understand CPU and memory utilization for infrastructure, duration and serverless execution, or for network traffic. For more advanced metrics monitoring operations, teams can send custom metrics to monitor signals like the number of active users.

Did you know that CloudWisdom’s Bill Analysis tool shows you not just the services currently monitored by CloudWisdom but all services to deliver an overall view of your AWS cost? And if you’ve set up and configured consolidated billing to link multiple AWS accounts, you can include data from all those accounts in that view. You can even add multiple billing orgs to the same CloudWisdom account.

As corporations grow, the need to organize user data and assets into a hierarchical structure becomes critical to to simplify storage access of those assets. LDAP enables organizations to store, manage, and secure information about the organization, its users, and assets. In this guide, we’ll explain what LDAP is, its uses, and how it works.

Managing IT infrastructure is impossible without proper monitoring solutions and tools. Monitoring requires regular checks on the status, and the best way to gather details would be in the form of reports. Advanced IT monitoring solutions provide an automatic diagnosis of performance and availability issues across your IT network; manual interventions help optimize the process. Manual interventions make sure you don’t miss out on any warning signs before reaching the critical points.

In this article, we are going to look at the architecture of Apache ActiveMQ and how to monitor critical metrics of ActiveMQ using Hosted Prometheus and Hosted Grafana. If you would like to follow the steps in this blog, make sure to sign up for the MetricFire free trial. You can use Graphite and Grafana directly from our platform. MetricFire is a Hosted Graphite, Grafana and Prometheus service, where we do the setup and management of these open-source tools so you don’t have to.

The rapid pace of updates and upgrades to operating systems, software frameworks, libraries, programming language versions – a boon to the future of fast-paced software development, has also come to slightly bite us in the back because of having to manage these very many dependencies with their different versions across different environments.