Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A VPN connection comes in handy to establish a link between private servers and remote users. As a protected data path, the presence of the VPN tunnel paves the way for improved data security. Therefore, data transmissions between the network and device have the additional security of data encryption. But at the same time many inappropriate IPs can access your VPN, putting data security at stake. So, how do you deal with such situations? You definitely can’t stop using VPNs right.

HAProxy connection limits and queues can help protect your servers and boost throughput when load balancing heavy amounts of traffic. When you use HAProxy as an API gateway in front of your services, it has the ability to protect those servers from traffic spikes. By utilizing connection limits and queues, you can ensure traffic flows through your network at an even pace.

Today, Heroku is used by many developers from a wide range of small to large enterprise size companies. As you are reading this article, you yourself may also be using Heroku to build and operate apps. So, how do you monitor the apps you run on Heroku? It is seen that many people are using Heroku metrics given its standard built-in feature and it being offered for free.

‍Today we’re excited to be rolling out a completely redesigned Sleuth experience. Our new Command Center provides one place to visit so developers can quickly and safely deploy new changes. ‍

We asked in a recent poll which popular TV show your IT team resembles the most. Big Brother came out on top, with almost 40% of respondents saying that their incident resolution process most resembled this show. Would you compare your incident management process to an episode of Big Brother? If so, it's likely that your IT environment is highly monitored, but incidents still seem to slip through the cracks.

VirtualMetric, an all-in-one monitoring solution, announces a partnership with OCS Distribution, the leading broadline* technology distributor in Russia. This partnership will provide over 7000 resellers throughout Russia with access to the VirtualMetric monitoring suite. With over two decades of experience and 26 offices across Russia, OCS Distribution became one of the leading distributors in the Russian IT market.

In the first post of this series, we provided guidance for managing the many facets of a compliance program — taming the “compliance beast.” While there are many factors to consider, I’d argue that none is more essential than a reliable means of enforcement.

This year, you tell yourself, you are going to be prepared! You will arm yourself with a new status page, and create web monitoring for every important service in your arsenal. Like the proverbial Eye of Sauron, nothing will escape your omnipotence. But too many tools in your set can contribute to alert fatigue. Alert fatigue occurs when your team starts to feel like they are always on call. They might already secretly feel this way.

Monitoring vs observability – is there even a difference and is your monitoring system observable? Observability has gained a lot of popularity in recent years. Modern DevOps paradigms encourage building robust applications by incorporating automation, Infrastructure as Code, and agile development. To assess the health and “robustness” of IT systems, engineering teams typically use logs, metrics, and traces, which are used by various developer tools to facilitate observability.

Incidents are inevitable, and the reality is some of them are inevitably going to repeat themselves. FireHydrant has always strived to make the entire incident response lifecycle smooth, but up until today, common incident types were slightly burdensome for our customers. We decided it was time to help people make it easy to declare incidents using easy-to-use templates, which we’re deeming Incident types.

Contact our Kubernetes team We’re now well into 2021, and as we plan ahead for our roadmap and activities around Kubernetes for the year, it helps to look back and reflect on everything that took place for Canonical in the K8s space within the year that passed. Kubernetes has always been a crucial part of Canonical’s vision and contribution to the IT world.

Cloud environments are susceptible to security issues. A big contributor is misconfigured resources. Misconfigured S3 buckets are one example of a security risk that could expose your organization’s sensitive data to bad actors. Policies and regular enforcement of best practices are key to reducing this security risk. However, manually checking and enforcing security is time-consuming and can fall behind with all the demands a busy DevOps team faces every day.

In this article we explore the basics of monitoring Amazon Web Services (AWS) by feeding metrics to Grafana through Hosted Graphite’s agent and also through Hosted Graphite’s AWS add-on. This will allow us to monitor metrics from applications and servers hosted in AWS with clarity and depth. This article assumes you have created a Hosted Graphite account.

Today’s announcement of Longhorn 1.1, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox project, is exciting news for users of Rancher, SUSE’s Kubernetes management platform, and the Kubernetes community. Longhorn is an enterprise-grade, cloud native container storage solution that went GA in June 2020. Since then, adoption has increased by 235 percent.

Five years ago today, our co-founders launched Gremlin with a simple but bold mission: Build a more reliable internet. Over the past five years, the practice of Chaos Engineering is increasingly employed as a means for proactively testing systems to make them more resilient and reliable.

What does reliability look like at a company that has thousands of employees and provides critical communication services to over 150,000 customers? We talked with Tyler Wells, Senior Director of Engineering at Twilio, to learn how he and his team created a culture of reliability at Twilio. He talked in depth about his experiences developing reliability goals, building reliability practices, and aligning engineering teams on these objectives.

The shift to Observability Over the last six months, unified monitoring, log management, and event management vendors have reoriented their technology portfolios (often without any change to the underlying functionality) towards Observability. In so doing, a fair amount of confusion has been generated in the market.

In this episode of DevOps Radio, Shipa’s CEO and Founder Bruno Andrade joins host Brian Dawson to discuss his thoughts on the future of Kubernetes. DevOps Radio is a CloudBees-sponsored podcast series. Hosting experts from around the industry, the show dives into what it takes to successfully develop, deliver and deploy software in today’s ever-changing business environment. From DevOps to Docker, each episode features real-world insights and a few stories, tips, industry scoop and more.

IT incident management is a fundamental operational process designed to ensure rapid service restoration. This process is typically assigned to the help desk but is also very much entrenched in the day-to-day of DevOps. When incident management goes right, service is restored quickly and the impact on productivity, continuity, and customer satisfaction is minimal.

At Google Cloud, we strive to bring Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) culture to our customers not only through training on organizational best practices, but also with the tools you need to run successful cloud services. Part and parcel of that is comprehensive observability tooling—logging, monitoring, tracing, profiling and debugging—which can help you troubleshoot production issues faster, increase release velocity and improve service reliability.

On October 22, 2020, Shipa launched a new web series called “Coffee & Containers.” C&C was conceived as a place for practitioners and IT leaders to learn and collaborate on all things microservices, cloud-native, containers, Kubernetes, etc. We were very proud to launch this series with Kelsey Hightower, Thought Leader and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform, and Bruno Andrade, Founder and CEO of Shipa.io.

Regulatory compliance is time-consuming and expensive. A recent survey of IT security professionals found that, on average, organizations must comply with 13 different regulations and spend an average of $3.5M annually on compliance activities, with audit-related activities consuming 232 person hours per year. With a team of five people, that adds up to 1.5 months a year devoted to audit-related activity. That’s a lot of hours that could have been spent on initiatives driving customer value.

DevSecOps — or the merging of Ops and Security — has been at the center of discussion for the better part of the outgoing decade. Today, the complexity of infrastructure change, demands security and DevOps teams to work together more efficiently. But there are hurdles to adoption of DevSecOps as a methodology. Cloud-native applications often live in multiple clouds across data centers, co-location, and public clouds.

Making predictions is a tricky business at the best of times, but especially after a year that turned the world upside down. Even so, we have decided to talk to the IT leaders and discover what we should get ready for in 2021. With technology development, COVID-19 impact, and the new cybersecurity issues happening in the world, the IT engineers responsible for the IT infrastructure monitoring should be always ready to adapt to the new challenges.

We’ve released version 1.5 of the HAProxy Kubernetes Ingress Controller. This version unlocks access to the raw HAProxy configuration language for power users to gain more control. You can also enable mutual TLS authentication between the ingress controller and services, enforce Basic authentication, and return custom error pages to users.

The adoption of cloud-based solutions has become increasingly common. The proof for this is evident – according to Gartner, Inc., the worldwide public cloud services market is expected to grow by 6.3% in 2020, up to a staggering $257.9 billion in value. The Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, released on April 28, 2020, states that more than 90% of respondents have adopted cloud computing, with the top three cloud service providers being – AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

When making changes to applications these days, it’s hard to understand and predict the impact of those changes before you deploy. API connections are multiplying, and with new cloud platforms such as containers/serverless, it only add to the complexity. Some people have trouble remembering whether they closed the garage door or turned off the coffee maker. Can you remember all the details of your latest API contract change? Let alone who would be impacted and needed to be notified?

We recently ran a quick poll where we asked the audience, “When an IT incident occurs at your company, what TV show does it most resemble?” Twenty-three percent of respondents told us that CSI: Crime Scene Investigation resembled them the most. We needed to dig into that a little deeper. Let’s walk through the typical steps of figuring out the root cause, in CSI fashion: Photographs are critical in the world of CSI.

One thing that 2020 has clearly shown us is that communications services is a basic and fundamental driver of our global economy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we realized that many tasks can be done at home, if access to communications services is sufficient. Many of us can work from home or other locations outside of the traditional office; students do not have to be physically present at school to participate in lectures; and we don’t need to go to movie theaters watch a new film release.

Nowadays developers are in the driver’s seat regarding a lot of decisions for the tools they use. In this update from Tyler Jewell, he covers what he sees are the Top 5 trends that will take place this year. While it’s a bit of a crowded chart, he plots the companies that he sees driving these trends. If you drill into the Service Catalog trend, Jewell sees a couple of different groups working on ways to help developers deal with the deluge of Services (aka APIs).

There’s no better time than now to dedicate effort to reliable software. If it wasn’t apparent before, this past year has made it more evident than ever: People expect their software tools to work every time, all the time. The shift in the way end-users think about software was as inevitable as our daily applications entered our lives, almost like water and electricity entered our homes.

This article is a full tutorial on HAProxy monitoring and the best tools to get it done right. We will be looking into how to collect HAProxy metrics using a collectd daemon, push them into Graphite and visualize them in Grafana. To follow the steps in this blog, sign up for the MetricFire free trial, where you can use Graphite and Grafana directly in our platform.

Are you in two minds when it comes to learning new programming languages? Probably you may feel the same when you first heard about Rust programming language. Good things require some effort and here's what I have to say after using Rust programming language in production for a 6-month duration – It is great and Simply superb! Let's get the clear practical experience picture with Rust at Qovery.

I’ve recently started working on a new project to build a Discord bot in Go, mostly as a way to learn more Go but also so I can use it to manage various things in Azure and potentially elsewhere. I figured it’d be useful to document some of this project to give some insights as to what I’ve done and why. First up was setting up the CI/CD pipeline for it so that I don’t need to worry about it later and can save myself a bunch of time when testing.

Shipa (https://www.shipa.io), the full lifecycle application-centric framework for Kubernetes and multi-cluster portability, just got better! Version 1.2 is now available, and we are excited to share these key new features and improvements with the Shipa community.

Modern datacenters can contain thousands of network appliances, such as routers, switches, firewalls, and servers, so it’s important for your monitoring strategy to provide comprehensive visibility into every piece of your infrastructure. Datadog Network Device Monitoring already allows you to collect a wealth of telemetry from all of your SNMP-managed devices, which are automatically discovered by the Datadog Agent.

Istio is an open source service mesh that provides an abstraction layer for network traffic between applications, so you can run canary deployments, implement circuit breakers, and otherwise manage the architecture of your network using high-level configuration files. As service meshes become increasingly popular among containerized environments, dev and ops teams need to ensure that Istio is healthy, performant, and routing traffic as intended to keep their network infrastructure running smoothly.

The HAProxy Data Plane API 2.2 lays the foundation for first-class service discovery and introduces native support for Consul. It also adds storage and file handling for SSL certificates, Map files, and SPOE configuration files.

NVIDIA Jetson is a family of embedded, low-power computing boards designed to support machine learning and AI applications at the edge. Organizations use Jetson boards for complex video and image processing and analysis, automating build processes in factories, and improving city infrastructures. For example, Jetson-based devices enable cities to analyze traffic patterns with their existing traffic cameras in order to find ways to improve their most congested intersections.

Serverless platforms like AWS Lambda have helped accelerate application development by removing the need to provision and manage infrastructure resources. However, serverless architecture presents new monitoring challenges. Because AWS Lambda handles underlying infrastructure for you, you don’t have access to system-level metrics. Instead, you have to monitor your Lambda functions for insight into their performance and resource usage.

There are some things in life that seem too good to be true. So good, in fact, that they border on the edge of mythology. We see this often in the case of Cross-Domain Topology. Cross-Domain Topology ties together all the pieces of a hybrid, dynamic IT environment, so you can instantly see how changes impact your environment. It’s something that a lot of people didn’t even think was a possibility. While unicorns are myths, Cross-Domain Topology is very real. Here’s how it works.

Shipa’s application management framework, integrated into OKE, provides an out-of-the-box way for organizations to build, deploy and operate the full life-cycle of Kubernetes applications. With Shipa and OKE, organizations can make up for lost time and start getting value out of Kubernetes immediately. In this webcast, you will learn how Shipa and OKE.

At Cloudsmith, we are proud of our partnership network. We work hard to collaborate and integrate with the best DevOps tools available. Building performant, modern workflows requires frictionless integrations between tooling. Integrating Cloudsmith repositories with your CI/CD processes facilitates rapid development. Build, test, and deploy/distribute your software in repeatable, performant ways.

For quick, scalable, highly-available web services, few options compare to AWS Lambda. Just provide your code, add a little configuration, and you're done! In this article, Milap Neupane will introduce us to Lambda, show us how to get it working with Ruby and the Serverless Framework, and discuss reasons to use — or to not use! — Lambda in production.

2020 was, needless to say, not the best. Looking on the brighter side, in December, FireHydrant turned 2, and in spite of it all, we grew quite a bit. We raised our $8M Series A in May, our team grew nearly 4x in size, added some amazing features such as making FireHydrant Runbooks even more powerful with conditions, and great integrations, which you can find here. But even better, we got to work with all of you!

Moving full speed ahead into 2021, a year that is slated to be marked by unpredictability, fast-paced change, and (still) a lot of disruption – no organization can afford to allow such disorder to impact productivity, operations, and the business overall.

IT structures across organizations are bound to get complicated one way or another. If you’ve been in business for at least a decade, chances are you’ve acquired a complex, layered system of technology that’s a hodge-podge of old and new. This complexity brings new challenges for infrastructure monitoring. It goes without saying that any enterprise needs effective IT infrastructure monitoring. But when technology is evolving at the pace it is, things can get difficult.

In this article, we are going to see how we can integrate Google Cloud with Grafana. We will integrate Google Cloud SQL with Grafana and plot the metrics on Grafana. We will also look at how we can use Google Stackdriver as the data source in Grafana to expose the metrics of Google Cloud VM’s and platforms. To use Grafana immediately, we will be using Hosted Grafana by MetricFire.

Both Graphite and InfluxDB are time-series monitoring data platforms, both of which have high levels of adoption throughout many industries. Both of them are suitable for enterprise use, are scalable, and are stable. That being said, there are some benefits and drawbacks to each. While InfluxDB has many benefits, many developers still prefer Graphite due to its large community, stability, and reliability.

Using the cloud reduces on-premises infrastructure costs and related maintenance. Instead of deploying more servers, storage, and networking components to your own datacenter, you are now deploying these as cloud resources. Using the cloud is supposed to reduce infrastructure and maintenance costs. However, deploying cloud resources also risks over-commissioning, under-usage, and keeping resources running that are not always needed or, even worse, no longer in use.

Building Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams is hard! There are so many articles and explanations of what SRE means, it’s easy to get lost. Going beyond understanding what the individual SRE role is into building and scaling a team of SREs is more of a challenge. It’s important to find the right information that will help you take your SRE team to the next level.

Although it is not well known to the general public, virtualization technology is widely used in technical environments for being useful when carrying out multiple tasks and for the possibilities it offers for better resource usage. Virtualization technology software is increasingly used by professionals in the sector, having already become an essential tool for the work of many of them.

How does one manage monitoring in the age of digital infrastructure as code? Also as code, of course! Combining HashiCorp Terraform Cloud and Checkly enables you to configure synthetic and API monitoring as part of your existing infrastructure codebase. It is flexible, programmable and will keep you out of maintenance hell, even at scale: it is monitoring for developers. Extending your existing Terraform Cloud configuration takes only two minutes. Let's take a look together.

Assuring the security of PostgreSQL and all open source database systems is critical as many learned with the PgMiner botnet attacks in December 2020. Having an understanding of, and visibility into, how these attacks happen and following standard best practices is the best way to make sure that your data is not at risk. This blog details the latest security issue with PostgreSQL, how to fix/prevent these attacks and how to ensure security of your PostgreSQL database instances.

Ketch (https://www.theketch.io) is an open-source application delivery framework for Kubernetes. YAML is a human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. Customized YAML files are used by many for the complicated task of deploying to Kubernetes.

Hardware virtualization, also known as hardware assisted virtualization, is the creation of virtual versions of operating systems and computers. The technology was made by AMD and Intel for their server platforms. Its purpose was to improve the processor’s performance and meet virtualization challenges such as translating memory addresses and instructions. Many IT businesses have deployed servers that run only at a fraction of their total capacity.

For developers and programmers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers many benefits. It gives you access to the computing and DevOps tools you need at the press of a button — which helps you get products out the door fast. However, it can be challenging to control your costs and identify waste. In this comprehensive guide, we will examine some practical steps you can take for AWS cost optimization.

If you’re a veteran in this space, you probably understand the many incident response metrics and concepts, along with the many (at times exasperating) acronyms. For those new to the space, or even those with years of experience, the terminology is often overwhelming. If you’re one of those people who’s struggling to navigate through the world of DevOps metrics, we’ve created this article for you.

In its latest report, research firm Gartner tackles the trending subject of Observability. According to Gartner, "Observability is the evolution of monitoring into a process that offers insight into digital business applications, speeds innovation and enhances customer experience. I&O leaders should use observability to extend current monitoring capabilities, processes, and culture to deliver these benefits." This blog post gives you a sneak-peek of this new analyst report about observability.

Now that we know the advantages of leveraging Ketch over other tools such as Helm to ease the deployment of our applications (BLOG: Helm vs. Ketch when Deploying Applications), a good next step is for us to understand how we can tie Ketch to our CI pipeline and have an automated deployment process. For this example, we will leverage Ketch, GitHub Actions, and a Kubernetes cluster on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE).

Amazon DocumentDB is a managed MongoDB-compatible database service provided by AWS. It provides the database in clusters, with multiple instances, for high-availablity. To help with cost-reduction strategies, AWS allows DocumentDB clusters to be stopped and restarted. While the cluster is stopped, you’re not charged. So it’s a great candidate to shut off overnight and on weekends if it’s not needed.

OpenStack has been around for a good while now, and many of us associate it with the period of IT technology’s initial transition from individual appliance implementation on hardware, to cloud compute and virtualisation. And yet in 2020 we cannot skip this topic when talking telco infrastructure. So how is OpenStack still pertinent to telco organisations, and what in broad terms is new and exciting or worth discussing today about OpenStack?

Since 2018, Watchdog has provided automatic, machine learning-based anomaly detection to notify you of performance issues in your applications. Earlier this year, Watchdog started grouping APM anomalies across your services, allowing you to better understand the scope of the issue.

As an IT specialist, you should have an aptitude for all the essential tools vital for the efficient running of IT infrastructure. These software programs designed for their specific purposes basically serve the same purpose as an engineer’s toolkit. They make it easy to get the job done, and on top of that, get it done well. Depending on your job, you may or may not need to use all the tools. But as an IT professional, you should know which tool can help you with which task.

With HAProxy, you can implement a circuit breaker to protect services from widespread failure. Martin Fowler, who is famous for being one of the Gang of Four authors who wrote Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, hosts a website where he catalogues software design patterns. He defines the Circuit Breaker pattern like this: The basic idea behind the circuit breaker is very simple. You wrap a protected function call in a circuit breaker object, which monitors for failures.

Hacks that make headlines are painful for everyone involved, but with some clever preparation and web monitoring at your side you can avoid the worst of this pain. Those who have been victimized face a steep uphill battle to reclaim trust and authority. Unwitting victims, like customers and end users, suffer downtime or leaks containing personally identifiable information. If your eye is not on security, your organization is inviting these kinds of attacks.

Get started with Gremlin's Chaos Engineering tools to safely, securely, and simply inject failure into your systems to find weaknesses before they cause customer-facing issues. Coming out of recessions, merger and acquisition volume typically picks up as lower interest rates drop the cost of capital and Corporate Development teams begin executing on the strategies they’ve developed during the holding periods. This year has been no exception, with $350 billion spent on tech acquisitions to date.

In December, AWS announced the new VPC Reachability Analyzer tool. Using this tool, AWS can analyse the paths within your VPC to determine whether the various components in your VPC can communicate with each other or not.