Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Most of the time the build and deployment pipelines we create will run on compute provided by the Azure DevOps cloud and the only decision we need to make is whether to select a Windows or Linux Agent. Sometimes though, the specification for the VM that Azure DevOps spins up may not be right for our needs. We may need more memory or a particular OS version. This is when custom agents and Agent Pools come into play.

Even if you don’t work with Prometheus day-to-day, you most likely have heard of it. After Kubernetes was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Prometheus became the second project to be incubated soon after. That was back in 2016 and it is still one of the most active CNCF projects. Why is it so popular? It’s the de facto monitoring tool for containerized workloads running on-prem and in the cloud – that is, it’s the monitoring tool for Kubernetes.

Being the most popular cloud solution provider, AWS needs no introduction. With its powerful and numerous services and solutions, many companies of all sizes and shapes run their applications and/or infrastructure on AWS. With AWS being integrated with other internal services as well as external solutions hosting the business apps, it is crucial to be aware of what's happening across the landscape and beyond, to ensure business continuity. The AWS plugin for SquaredUp helps you achieve exactly that.

Anyone managing Microsoft Azure will be aware of how quickly its costs can escalate. As cloud architectures grow in complexity—spanning hybrid environments, multi-subscription setups, and cross-platform integrations—the need for intelligent cost visibility tools intensifies. With enterprises typically overspending by 25%-35% on their cloud resources, Azure cost reporting has become a big focus for organizations navigating cloud financial management.

The M365 suite is vast, and the mountains of data that accumulate within each application are huge and ongoing. While data reporting is a necessity, management can feel unwieldy. Luckily, there is an array of reporting software on the market to support this challenge. This blog explores three powerful tools for M365 reporting: SquaredUp, Microsoft 365's native reporting tool, and Power BI.

InfluxDB is a powerful open-source time-series database widely used for monitoring system performance, IoT metrics, and application telemetry. With SquaredUp's InfluxDB plugin, you can effortlessly visualize and monitor your InfluxDB data, gaining real-time insights into your metrics alongside your other tools and services. This guide will walk you through connecting InfluxDB with SquaredUp, creating dashboards, setting up monitoring, and sharing your visualizations.

Most engineering teams today have a multiplicity of tools to meet all of the different challenges they face. Some people characterize this as a problem and describe it as 'tool sprawl'. At SquaredUp, we just see it as a fact of life that no tool can excel at every job and engineers will want to choose the best tool for each task. Many companies have multiple toolchains spread across different teams and departments.

If you are a DevOps manager you will be keenly aware that the role involves managing multiple toolchains across different clouds, platforms and environments. You also need to report on KPIs, DORA metrics, governance, security and a lot more. At SquaredUp, we understand these demands and have developed a suite of plugins and ready-to-run dashboards to help you reduce toil as well as pull all of your key analytics together within a single pane of glass.

Zendesk is one of the most popular customer service platforms, known for its ease of use, robust ticketing system, and powerful automation capabilities. While Zendesk comes with native reporting and dashboards, they can be limited in terms of customization and data correlation across different sources. Additionally, building complex visualizations in Zendesk often requires more advanced knowledge of their reporting tools. This is where SquaredUp comes in!

Azure is the cloud service provider of choice for a variety of reasons – such as its ease of use, its wide variety of services, the strong community around it and its integration with other Microsoft services. While Azure comes with native data visualization solutions such as dashboards and workbooks, they require a significant amount of Azure knowledge to create and maintain.