Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The Death of the Search Bar

I don't remember the last time I actually searched for something. Not in the way I used to, anyway. There was a time when having a question meant opening a search engine, typing a few words, staring at a page full of links, opening three or four of them, reading contradictory answers, deciding which one sounded believable, and eventually coming to a conclusion of my own.

What's new in Redgate Monitor: Postgres monitoring, CIS compliance, and an MCP server for AI

Redgate Monitor is a database performance and security monitoring tool covering SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud SQL. This session walks through Redgate Monitor's latest releases and roadmap: cloud cost tracking, Google Cloud SQL support, expanded Postgres diagnostics, permission-change security alerting, CIS benchmark compliance, and a new MCP server and chat assistant for AI-powered workflows.

Fabric, agents, and a security gap nobody's aware of (with Heidi Hasting) | The Simple Talk Podcast

Heidi Hasting joins host Kellyn Gorman for a chat featuring Microsoft Fabric, real-time intelligence, and a permissions trap that hands your data to a coworker's chatbot...Also: what MVP status really means, and where you should visit in South Australia (snakes included)!

Why Mocks Fail at Scale #softwareengineering #devops #softwaretesting #api #aicoding

Mocking for testing starts off easy, but once you scale to multiple teams and AI agents, handcrafted mocks become a serious form of technical liability. Instead of treating mocking as an individual software engineering task, shift your mindset to treat it as a platform engineering task focused on automation and continuously refreshed modern data. Watch to see how adopting technologies like traffic replay to simulate realistic backend sandboxes can transform your modern testing workflow!

How backend functions extend Cribl Apps: Scheduling, local testing, and logs

See how backend functions extend Cribl Apps with live data retrieval, scheduled jobs, local testing, deployment validation, and logging. In this walkthrough, Giovanni Mola shows developers how to connect app data sources such as Jira and news feeds, manage schedules, preview functions locally, verify a live deployment, and inspect emitted logs in Cribl Search.

24/7 On-Call Coverage With a Small Team

Running 24/7 on-call coverage with a small team is first of all an arithmetic problem, and most teams avoid doing the arithmetic because the answer is uncomfortable. There are 168 hours in a week. Your engineers work roughly 40 of them. Somebody has to be reachable for the other 128, and if you have four engineers, that somebody is each of them, one week in four, thirteen weeks a year.

Cron Job Monitoring: Catch Silent Failures

Cron job monitoring is the part of observability most teams skip until a backup turns out to have stopped running three weeks ago. A web server that falls over generates errors, trips a threshold and pages someone inside a minute. A nightly job that quietly stops running generates nothing at all. There is no error rate to alert on, no latency spike, no failed health check. There is only an absence, and absence is invisible to almost every monitoring setup by default.

Google Calendar On-Call Rotation Template

Most teams building an on-call rotation template in Google Calendar get the first two steps right and the third one wrong. Creating a shared calendar is easy. Inviting the team is easy. Expressing "four people, one week each, forever, handing off Monday morning" as a set of recurring events is where it falls apart, usually into a mess of one off entries that someone has to rebuild by hand every quarter.