Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In the ever-evolving landscape of modern business, the shift towards cloud-based solutions has been nothing short of transformative. Among these technological advancements, Microsoft 365 has emerged as a cornerstone, offering a comprehensive suite of tools to streamline operations, boost collaboration, and enhance productivity. As organizations increasingly embrace the cloud, the need to ensure the performance, security, and availability of these critical services becomes paramount.

As the adoption of cloud computing continues to surge, Microsoft Azure remains one of the leading platforms for businesses seeking scalable and efficient cloud solutions. I have been using Azure for a couple of years now; it provides a wide range of services and features, allowing organizations to host applications, store data, and deploy various workloads on a pay-as-you-go basis.

If you work in end user computing, you’re no stranger to the irritation of mystery issues. Tickets come in weekly but no matter how many teams you talk to, or fixes you try to implement, the issues never go away. You search and search for the root cause - but can’t find it. Frustrated, you assume it’s something outside of your control. Maybe the issues is caused by home Wi-Fi or end user error. That must be it – right?

If we start by sharing that AlertBot’s alert group feature lets you, well, alert certain groups, then you might wonder what earth-shattering revelations we have in store — such as water is wet, fire is hot, and the pain of Game of Throne’s final season will never, ever go away (seriously, whatever happened to Gendry?!). Yes, you’re right: the alert group feature IS about alerting groups of people about a site failure — but as George R.R.

Over the past six months, we have been working on optimizing query performance in Grafana Mimir, the open source TSDB for long-term metrics storage. First, we tackled most of the out-of-memory errors in the Mimir store-gateway component by streaming results, as we discussed in a previous blog post. We also wrote about how we eliminated mmap from the store-gateway and as a result, health check timeouts largely disappeared.

The Accelerate State of Devops Report highlights four key metrics (known as the DORA metrics, for DevOps Research & Assessment) that distinguish high-performing software organizations: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time-to-restore, and change fail rate. Observability can kickstart a virtuous cycle that improves all the DORA metrics.