Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It’s 3am, and you’re woken up by frantic calls and messages from users at your company—this is the everyday life of a sysadmin. Constantly surrounded by numerous tickets and persistent users who require immediate solutions, the life of a sysadmin is not a bed of roses. Their tasks are not limited to server management, maintenance, and repair, but also completely supporting a smoothly running production environment with minimal or no complaints from end users.

Kubernetes is THE buzzword these days. Almost every IT organization is currently using it or is in the process of implementing it as part of their infrastructure. The transition to Kubernetes is complicated, whether a company is using an on-premises, cloud, hybrid, or managed solution, and it usually involves other changes in the codebase, such as shifting to a microservices architecture. While the implementation phase is led by the DevOps team, it requires the participation of the whole R&D group.

Logs provide invaluable information about issues you need to troubleshoot. In some circumstances, that may mean that you have to look back at old logs. For example, you may be running a security audit and need to analyze months-old HTTP request logs for a list of specific IP addresses over a period of time. Or you might need to investigate why a scheduled service never occurred, or run an exhaustive postmortem on incidents that happened over a couple months but that you suspect are related.

Application performance monitoring (APM) dovetails nicely with infrastructure monitoring, allowing you to monitor app performance and end-user satisfaction in context with the rest of your infrastructure. That’s why we unveiled Datadog APM to complement our infrastructure monitoring platform and provide full-stack observability.

Cloudsmith provides first-class support for CircleCI with our official orb. Using the orb, users can easily integrate publishing to Cloudsmith with their existing CircleCI workflows.

Chef and Puppet are two popular tools for configuration management. These type of tools help engineers to maintain a consistent configuration in all servers. For instance, all servers might need to have IIS with a binding to port 443 for HTTPS access and the respective firewall rule for inbound traffic. More importantly, if anyone removes the firewall rule, these type of tools will keep consistency by creating the firewall rule again.

When you find a software engineer who passes your code test, you’ll want to bring them in for an in-office interview. In this part of our series on hiring software engineers as the CTO of a startup, we’ll talk about Blue Matador’s approach to the in-office interview and the insights I’ve gained in this part of the CTO experience.