Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For many companies, the beginning of October is also the beginning of the fourth and final quarter of the fiscal year. In IT, it’s a time to prepare for the new year by defining our priorities and setting our budget. COVID-19 threw a wrench into all of our 2020 plans last year and a lot has changed since then. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the need for a network monitoring system in your software stack.

You might have heard us say it before but downtime really does happen to any website, anywhere. Website downtime essentially doesn’t discriminate; it doesn’t matter if you’re a huge multi-billion dollar company or if you’re a start-up finding your feet in the online world. Downtime happens to the best of us. So to really drive this point home, we’ve put together the websites that have suffered downtime this June and how they dealt with the issue.

We’ve all heard the jokes about how us Brits can’t handle the hot weather but when the UK hit record highs in July this year, we have to admit that we really did struggle. No more so than our friends over at Google. Google isn’t a stranger to the occasional outage and website downtime, after seeing Google Maps go down in May earlier this year. But this time, the outage was apparently due to the soaring temperatures we were experiencing.

The summer of 2022 is a strange time to be attending a tech conference. The “Pandemic Pause” has left us all hungry for connection and a little awkward about it. While the world is largely returning to a semblance of comfort with larger public events, COVID is still a real and present threat, something we keep in the backs of our minds all the time.

The SolarWinds® Papertrail™ software as a service (SaaS) Add-On in the DigitalOcean Marketplace is one of the most exciting developments to come out of the DigitalOcean and Papertrail partnership. With the Add-On, developers can seamlessly add the simple yet powerful log management Papertrail is known for to their DigitalOcean infrastructure. In an earlier post, we reviewed how the Add-On helps teams simplify their log management tasks.

Monitoring and reporting on your most important business metrics is a fundamental part of any APM or ITIM solution. Our Retrace Power User Tips and Tricks series has already looked at “Error and Log Management” functionalities. We’ve discussed useful, advanced features for monitoring app performance in our “Extending APM” post. In this latest edition, let’s take a look at how power users capture advanced server and application metrics.

The Core Splunk platform is rightfully recognized as having sparked the log analytics revolution when viewed through the lenses of ingest, search speed, scale, and usability. Their original approach leveraged a MapReduce approach, and it still stores the ingested data on disk in a collection of flat files organized as “buckets.” These immutable buckets are not human-readable and largely consist of the original raw data, indexes (.tsidx files), and a bit of metadata.