Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The Domain Name System, DNS for short, is one of the most important protocols on the internet, and yet relatively few people understand its purpose. DNS is a protocol which governs how computers exchange data online. Its purpose, simply stated, is to match names with numbers, helping to convert memorable domain names (such as statuscake.com), into an IP address (such as 8.8.8.8 for Google.com) that your browser can use. DNS is essentially a map or a phone book of the internet.

We are all aware of the spam folder in our email dashboard. This article deals with how spam filters automatically identify and divert spam mail from our inbox to the spam folder. Spam filters are used to screen inbound emails (the emails entering a particular network) and outbound emails (the emails leaving the network). The Internet Service Providers utilize both methods for protecting the receiver and the sender. There are many types of spam filtering solutions available.

A multi-tenant architecture is essentially a framework in which a common instance of a software application is used to service several client applications or tenants. This multi-tenant architecture has found extensive adoption in SaaS applications, which cater to requests from tens and thousands of clients. The main reason for the adoption of multi-tenancy is the efficient and optimal use of resources and funds, along with delivering seamless service.

Digital transformation is vital to business today. However, it can increase digital risks, which can take many forms. To help ensure your organization is protected against business disruptions, noncompliance, and errors, you need a robust digital risk management program. Our three-part Managing Digital Risk and Beyond webinar series is designed to help you prepare for, manage, and address digital risks in your organization: Develop a risk management program.

We’re happy to announce the release of new muting features for Datadog monitors. Scoped monitor muting allows teams to eliminate unnecessary alerting during scheduled maintenance, testing, auto scaling events, and instance reboots. Your teams will therefore be able to filter out expected events and quickly pinpoint critical issues in your infrastructure. Previously, monitor muting was binary: all-or-nothing.

There are several different testing methods you can use as part of your development process to ensure you build high-quality applications. Shift-left testing is one approach that has become popular with agile teams because it enables them to move the testing phase to earlier stages of the development life cycle, which is a primary goal for agile development. Shift-left testing has a few advantages over traditional methods.

Git is a terrific tool that many developers use to keep track of their projects’ versions. Despite the fact that there are many different version control systems, git is by far the most used. The focus on distributed development and the ease with which branches can be used for good reasons. A branch is a simple approach of departing from the main development flow. It's typically used in a branch to add a new feature or correct an issue.

When we were moving an app to Kubernetes, we encountered a peculiar situation where other services running on Kubernetes started throwing a ThreadError from time to time, saying that a resource is unavailable. We started investigating, and it turned out that you want to know where your AppSignal error has occurred. A short reminder - Kubernetes works on two levels: So, you want to know which pod and which node ran a particular AppSignal transaction.

Anyone who is responsible for database performance knows how demanding and challenging database performance tuning is when managing a database. One of the critical functions of this process – database monitoring – is often overlooked. Database monitoring includes identifying the right SQL for tuning, determining right way to tune and whether SQL is right thing to tune.

The observability of metrics is a key factor for a successful operations team, allowing for increasingly effective visualizations, analysis, and troubleshooting. Google Cloud works with third-party partners, such as Grafana Labs, to make it easy for customers to create their desired observability stack leveraging a combination of different tools. More than two years ago, we collaborated with Grafana Labs to introduce the Cloud Monitoring plugin for Grafana.