Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A guide to deploying Grafana Loki and Grafana Tempo without Kubernetes on AWS Fargate

At Seniorlink, we provide services and technology to support families caring for their loved ones at home. In the past two years we’ve expanded our programs across the United States, and so our need to observe our application systems has grown too.

Switching RMMs: are you doing it for the right reasons?

Sometimes it makes sense to switch your RMM vendor. For example, if your services have evolved to new requirements or you know there’s a good vendor who can really help your business. But I often see MSPs consider it for the wrong reasons. They think they’ll find a silver bullet in the next technology solution, not realizing their technology issue may actually be a deeper business issue. This is where having an MSP vendor who truly treats you as a partner can matter.

Microsoft Operator Connect

In March 2021, Microsoft announced Operator Connect, a new way for organizations to connect Microsoft Teams to a telecom provider. From an enterprise buyer’s perspective, Operator Connect delivers a new “apps store” type of experience to enable organizations to choose a telecom provider and connect Teams users to the PSTN from the Teams admin center. Equally important, Operator Connect enables a new set of menu-based user configuration tools within the Teams admin center.

Building an Integration? Here's When to Use Apps instead of Plugins

In the last few months, we have been working on a new Apps framework for developers. The idea behind this framework is to make it easier for more developers to integrate external applications or their own applications into Mattermost. But wait a moment, don’t we have Plugins for that? Yes, but Apps provide some advantages to developers over Plugins.

The Importance of Visualizing Your IT Environment

Most everyone has some source of information on the health of their environments. Your experts know where to go and what to do when you get those cryptic messages and log files. To those content with the deep knowledge and where events and log files supply you with everything you need, I applaud you – you belong to a rare breed. Combing through logs or events takes time and effort, and rarely does it yield the speediest “return-to-service” solution.

Kubernetes observability challenges in cloud-native architecture

Kubernetes is the de-facto platform for orchestrating containerized workloads and microservices, which are the building blocks of cloud-native applications. Kubernetes workloads are highly dynamic, ephemeral, and are deployed on a distributed and agile infrastructure. Although the benefits of cloud-native applications managed by Kubernetes are plenty, Kubernetes presents a new set of observability challenges in cloud-native applications. Let’s consider some observability challenges.

The Service Desk and Parenthood's Shared Classroom

This past April, my husband and I took on our most exciting and daunting chapter yet: parenthood. Despite the chaos around us, we made the most of our pregnancy and thoroughly enjoyed sifting through baby clothes, putting together his nursery, choosing a name...the works. When it came time to bring our little guy home, I thought we had relatively grounded expectations for what our lives would look like as a family of three.

No Internet? No Problem. Use Artifactory with an Air Gap - Part I

Virtually all development organizations need access to remote public resources such as Maven Central, NuGet Gallery, npmjs.org, Docker Hub etc., to download dependencies needed for a build. One of the big benefits of using Artifactory is its remote repositories which proxy these remote resources and cache artifacts that are downloaded.

CDN Observability - Why You Must Monitor Your Extended Infrastructure

The content delivery network (CDN) has been an integral part of application infrastructure for more than two decades. A CDN is critical to the end-user experience, but it is no longer considered to be just a caching server. It has evolved to provide security from cyber threats, including DDOS attacks along with front end optimization. Although CDN services are now an indispensable part of any application infrastructure, visibility into CDN performance remains limited.

How to Avoid the Executive 'Swoop and Poop' and Other Best Practices for Operational Maturity

We’re eating at restaurants again. We’re seeing family after too long apart. Some of us may even be returning to the office. But, that doesn’t mean that the pressure is off for digital services, and growing in operational maturity still remains top of mind. While the digital transformations have been taking place for the last two decades, COVID-19 added pressure to speed initiatives.