Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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

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

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

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

If you've been familiar with FireHydrant previously, you've probably started to notice some strange things going on with the FireHydrant brand over the past several months. New pages? New content? New messaging? New colors? Yes, your eyes do not deceive you, we've been making some changes!

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

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