Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

State and local governments require a high level of performance and reliability for the millions of people accessing their web applications every day. The talent shortage and lack of resources to train their staff on how to use new technologies prevents them from drawing valuable insights from modern IT environments. IT infrastructure monitoring allows state and local governments to stay ahead of technology trends and face common challenges with intelligence and transparency.

Honeycomb Pro is about to get even better. Starting today, all Pro accounts have access to Honeycomb Metrics and two Service Level Objectives (SLOs), previously only available to Enterprise accounts. Full disclosure: Later this month, the price of Pro plans will be increasing as well (see below). However, existing Pro customers (including those that sign up before the new pricing goes into effect) will be able to enjoy the new capabilities at existing prices for a full year, until April 2023!

It’s common sense. When a logstorm hits, you don’t want to be left scrambling to find the one engineer from each team in your organization that actually understands the logging system – then spending even more time mapping the logging format of each team with the formats of every other team, all before you can begin to respond to the incident at hand. It’s a model that simply won’t scale.

I don’t care about religious wars over “which logger is the best”. They all have their issues. Having said that, the worst logger is probably the one built “in-house”… So yes, they suck, but re-inventing the wheel is probably far worse. Let’s discuss making these loggers suck less with proper usage guidelines that range from the obvious to subtle. Hopefully, you can use this post as the basis of your company’s standard for logging best practices.

When IT operators and architects begin their journey with Google Cloud, Day 0 observability needs tend to focus on infrastructure and aim to address questions about resource needs, a plan for scaling, and similar considerations. During this phase, developers and DevOps engineers also make a plan for how to get deep observability into the performance of third-party and open-source applications running on their Compute Engine VMs.

The one certainty you will find in IT, developer, and SRE roles is that things always change! One hot topic in DevOps communities is observability. A long word, you may be wondering what it really means and how you can add it to your skillset. Here’s a quick primer to get you going on your path to observability.

Organizations today are pressured to keep their IT applications and infrastructure up and running and minimize their downtime. While this has always been a critical goal, it’s become harder to achieve with modern architectures, such as microservices, containerization, edge computing, hybrid-cloud deployments and the newer development methods such as agile DevOps techniques.