Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Grafana 8.2 was released last week, and we’re excited to announce one of its new features: contact point testing. Now users of Grafana 8 alerting can test their contact points right from the contact points page. This feature makes it easier to configure Grafana 8 alerting and gives you the confidence in knowing that your contact points are working as expected before they fire. Here are the basics.

With the advent of IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and IaC (Infrastructure as Code), it is now possible to manage versioning, code reviews, and CI/CD pipelines at the infrastructure level through resource provisioning and on-demand service routing. Kubernetes is the indisputable choice for container orchestration.

Cloud adoption has got a tremendous uptrend as never before. The World pandemic has made startups, and enterprises move their legacy systems into Cloud to cut huge infrastructure maintenance costs. According to Gartner, cloud spending is forecasted to increase 23.1% at $332.3 billion in 2021 from $270 billion in 2020. We can even see enterprises using BizTalk servers moving to the Azure Cloud for better maintenance and features that confirm the above forecast.

Not all colors look good. Let me rephrase: not all colors look good on everything. This is even more applicable when it comes to websites. When put next to each other, it is important for colors to look good, have the right contrast and be readable. Thankfully there are ways to generate such colors - attractive, readable and complementary - using code. I started looking into generating attractive and complementary colors when we were working on a feature involving tags.

Here are the articles, videos, and tools that we’ve been excited about this September. We hope you enjoy these links, and we look forward to hearing what you’ve been reading in the comments or on the Interrupt Slack.

Integration is now the #1 IT expense category at many enterprises and new complexities increase the burden on Service Delivery, CI/CD, IBM MQ administration, and other “integration professionals” every day. Your enterprise has Microservices, Mobile, Mainframes, Cloud, and more applications and application updates than you can count and it takes the routing of transactions, messages and more through a rapidly growing integration infrastructure layer to make it all work together.

Congratulations to the Kubespray team on the release of 2.17! This release brings support for two of the newer features in Calico: support for the eBPF data plane, and also for WireGuard encryption. Let’s dive into configuring Kubespray to enable these new features.

Moving your database to the cloud using a PaaS option such as Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance reduces the maintenance overhead required from the database administrator (DBA). The DBA no longer must worry about managing backups or configuring high availability, for example. That said, the DBA still needs to tune the database’s performance and monitor SQL workloads. The Azure Portal offers several services to quickly identify performance issues for Azure SQL Databases.

Prometheus is an open-source, metrics-based event monitoring and alerting solution for cloud applications. It is used by nearly 800 cloud-native organizations including Uber, Slack, Robinhood, and more. By scraping real-time metrics from various endpoints, Prometheus allows easy observation of a system’s state in addition to observation of hardware and software metrics such as memory usage, network usage and software-specific defined metrics (ex.

Like zero trust security, being a cyber defender is a personal mindset. One can argue that it might be a form of paranoia, but being situationally aware while connected online is a nice behavioral attribute to have given today’s internet climate with the barrage of news regarding ransomware and data breaches.