Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

If you look back to the state of technology only a few decades ago, you’ll stumble upon a technological world full of silos and frustration. Two of an organization’s most vital teams—software development and IT operations—struggled to communicate effectively. Departments resided within silos, and development and testing were conducted at a snail’s pace.

Software engineering teams that adopt “as-code” practices, like using configuration files and automated workflows instead of manual configuration and tools, gain major improvements in velocity. But even companies that enjoy the success of as-code practices for development and delivery lag behind in applying them to operational concerns like monitoring and observability.

Observability is a new term that’s slowly entered the mainstream over the last two years. Today it’s used in the context of monitoring, but it’s much more than that. And it also goes way beyond visibility. So, in this blog, we set out to explore observability vs visibility and find out, what’s the difference? In a recent podcast, our friends at Riverbed neatly explained that seeing and observing are two different things, and can be compared to hearing vs listening.

The CNCF Annual Survey 2021 is in and makes for some very encouraging reading for the future of Kubernetes and its place in the tech landscape. The 2021 survey was the biggest yet, with some 3,829 developers, engineers, architects, and C-level execs in the cloud native space taking part. Here are some of our key takeaways…

StackState has always believed in the importance of open source and open standards, and we’ve demonstrated our commitment through ongoing support of open technologies. From the beginning, StackState supported StatsD and OpenMetrics. Even our agent is open source, designed to help organizations easily onboard our platform and to give them an extensible open way to observe their services. StackState is now proud to announce our next big open source step.

As a framework for goal-setting, the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) methodology is an incredibly useful tool when implemented properly. It can help your engineering team better plan and stay aligned toward common objectives through the duration of the development process. On an individual level, OKRs can also encourage each team member to make personal progress toward their own goals or common team goals that would benefit the company.

In part 1 of the CLI Stands For…A CLI Into Series, we outline why you would want to use the CLI, some of the benefits of doing so, and a bit of CLI history and terminology. In part 2 – An Introduction to Shell Commands, get ready to roll up your sleeves and dive into a deeper understanding of the terminal.

Honeycomb is an application monitoring tool that helps DevOps and SRE teams to operate more efficiently by offering rich observability solutions and intuitive team collaboration. It helps understand complex relationships within your distributed systems and troubleshoot issues accordingly. Squadcast is an end-to-end incident response tool. Built with an SRE mindset, it streamlines all the incident response activities.

AWS currently offers over 200 services. Some of those make up the AWS Cost Management suite. This group comprises AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR), AWS Budgets, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost Categories, and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection. Budgets and Cost Explorer are an excellent pair of complementary tools in this group. They have similarities that cause users to wonder if they need both and, if so, why. Here is a brief overview of the differences between AWS Budgets and Cost Explorer.

Are you surprised? Are you under where are the first four tips? I start this series of blog posts on my blog, and you can see and read the previous Best practices, Tips, and Tricks here: And I will be sharing some of them here and others on my blog. So stay tuned for both blogs. Of course, the most recurring task is adding comments to our triggers and actions, but it is always good to know you to delete them. Some of you may be thinking that is a trivial task, simple like adding a comment.