Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We’ve been working on something big. We’re building Request Metrics, a new service for web performance monitoring. TrackJS is a fantastic tool to understand web page errors, but what if your pages aren’t broken, just slow? What if the checkout page takes 10 seconds to load? What if that user API is slowing down from your recent database change? What pages have the worst user experience? Request Metrics will tell you that.

Monitoring has been around since the dawn of computing. Recently, however, there’s been a revolution in this field. Cloud native monitoring has introduced new challenges to an old task, rendering former solutions unsuitable for the job. When working with cloud native solutions such as Kubernetes, resources are volatile. Services come and go by design, and that’s fine—as long as the whole system operates in a regular way.

We’re really big fans of OpenTelemetry at Honeycomb. As we’ve blogged about before, OpenTelemetry is the next phase of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. Instead of working on separate but similar efforts, those two projects have merged to create OpenTelemetry. This is wonderful for the larger community as it gives people a clear way to instrument their code for metrics and traces that isn’t specific to any tool or vendor. OpenTelemetry is a CNCF sandbox project.

COVID-19 has caused an explosion in employees having to work remotely to maintain social distancing and prevent the rapid spread of the coronavirus. While a large remote workforce can place enormous strain on enterprise applications and hybrid infrastructure, IT operations teams must ensure that their employees can get the job done without frequent interruptions. At the same time, customers can no longer dine out or go to shopping malls, shifting to online services and mobile apps to meet their needs.

Employee monitoring has become a standard practice across different industry verticals to examine productivity and ensure that company resources are being used in the right manner. In addition to keeping a track of the manner in which employees are working, it also allows preventing theft and serves as evidence in litigation. Employee monitoring applications offer a means of tracking the activities of employees and remove any guesswork about what employees are doing throughout the day.

Has this scenario happened to you? You found a service. A SaaS product or hosted service: it could be anything. Maybe it’s a continuous integration service or perhaps it’s a service for capturing comments on your web site. Let’s call it Useful Service. You sign up, and you’re happy with it. Now you depend on it and your fortunes are tied to it. But day in and day out, it’s there for you, working reliably. Then all of the sudden: it’s not.