Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In 2022, Ofcom, a UK regulator, began its market study into the cloud industry to investigate the dominance that hyperscalers, especially AWS and Microsoft, hold over the industry and the limits this creates for customers. This investigation follows concerns surrounding customers feeling “locked in” to a single provider, potentially leading to inflated prices in the market¹.

When a headhunter reached out to me about the CEO role at Cloudsmith (where I started in August!), one of the first things I did was sign up for a trial account. The product's depth and sophistication really impressed me, and contributed to my decision to go ahead with the interviews. (Glad I did.) They were right; our web interface is still largely a Django web app, tightly coupled to the back end, and you can see the Bootstrap showing everywhere.

In the realm of enterprise solutions, Microsoft SharePoint has emerged as a cornerstone for fostering collaboration and managing content. Originating back in 2001, SharePoint has meticulously evolved, aligning itself with the changing dynamics of the corporate world. Today, it stands as a robust platform enabling organizations to create, manage, and share content in a highly secure environment.

DevOps practices in software development have revolutionized the way updates are released. However, many companies entrenched in ITIL practices find it challenging to seamlessly integrate with the DevOps practice of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CI/CD). This is because ITIL focuses on stability, which suits older systems, while DevOps is ideal for modern setups with its agile, automated practices.

Monitoring the performance and health of web applications is paramount for ensuring a seamless user experience. Flask offers developers the flexibility to build dynamic applications. However, as applications grow in complexity, so does the need for efficient monitoring solutions. This is where Grafana and Graphite come into play.

Most IT firms build their empire on Kubernetes, for its amazing flexibility and super scalability. RedHat OpenShift Container Platform (formerly OpenShift Enterprise) is a hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, which initially only operated on-premise, and has been open to service for more than nine years.

Prometheus is a very popular open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built in 2012. Its main focus is to provide valid insight into system performance by providing a way for certain variables of that system to be monitored. Prometheus displays the performance of these variables as a graph to allow its users to see their system’s performance at a glance.

Databases in one form or another are almost an inseparable part of modern applications. A popular one among them is MySQL on which this article will focus. But how to monitor MySQL? This article will give an introduction to this topic.