Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Bram Vogelaar is a DevOps Cloud Engineer at The Factory, and he recently delivered an intro to observability talk during our Grafana Labs' EMEA meetup. When I talk to customers, they might tell me about how their applications are running in two data centers, but when we probe a little further, it turns out that their observability stack is only available in one of them. This revelation hit close to home last March.

A trace is the end-to-end journey of one or more connected spans and a span is an operation or “work” taking place on a service. So when it comes to debugging a performance issue, being able to pick out slow spans out of a line up is the fastest way to seeing the root cause and knowing how to solve it. Suspect Spans surfaces a list of spans that correspond to where the most time in a transaction is spent.

Microsoft Teams is a product that already before the pandemic started to gain popularity and, during, helped employees communicate and collaborate in their new remote offices. There are precursors to Teams - in Microsoft's portfolio, Skype for Business was retired last year, and after that, the increase of Teams users have been skyrocketing. Why Teams differ from some of the other communication alternatives is the many functions of teams that allow for much more than a chat, call, or virtual meeting.

Performance monitoring is critical for a healthy software application. If you don’t have synthetic testing or real user monitoring in place, opportunities for performance optimizations are slipping through the cracks. With the guidance of a monitoring tool, on the other hand, you could be fixing problems such as slow-loading pages within the hour. The two main types of application monitoring are Real User Monitoring (RUM) and synthetic testing (or synthetic monitoring).

SAP delivers a suite of solutions for managing business operations, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management. Many of these solutions, including SAP S/4HANA, run on top of the SAP NetWeaver application development and integration platform. Enterprises and SAP managed providers often operate hundreds or even thousands of SAP NetWeaver systems, and Agentil provides a centralized, low-overhead way to monitor their entire fleet.

Every second counts when IT teams are called upon to resolve business impacting issues. In modern enterprises, poor communication, fragmented toolchains and spiralling IT complexity can conspire to slow down incident response, putting service availability and ultimately customer satisfaction in peril.