The latest News and Information on Monitoring for Websites, Applications, APIs, Infrastructure, and other technologies.
Logging is the process of keeping records of activities and data of a software program. It is an important aspect of developing, debugging, and running software solutions as it helps developers track their program, better understand the flow and discover unexpected scenarios and problems. The log records are extremely helpful in scenarios where a developer has to debug or maintain another developer’s code.
At the beginning of April 2022, a massive disruption in CircleCI caused large portions of their cloud offering to be unavailable for users worldwide. It occurred after CircleCI deployed a change to its front end and an auto-vacuum job on one of its core databases. Due to this outage, CircleCI users were unable to run tests and deploy code. After the incident, CircleCI promised to prevent these kinds of disruptions in the future.
As organizations are adopting more of the FinOps foundation practices and trying to optimize their cloud-computing costs, engineering plays an imperative role in that maturity. Traditional troubleshooting of applications nowadays relies heavily on static logs and legacy telemetry that developers added either when first writing their applications, or whenever they run a troubleshooting session where they lack telemetry and need to add more logs in an ad-hoc fashion.
We’ve all been in the situation before: it’s Friday at 5 PM and the only on-call engineer available to handle incidents is about to hit the slopes. Unfortunately, at that very moment, a customer reports to support that they are unable to access the company’s ecommerce website to complete a purchase. Internal monitoring systems seem quiet and services appear available on internal health dashboards.
By kickstarting a monitoring project with Prometheus, you might realize that you get an initial set of out-of-the-box metrics with just Node Exporter and Kube State Metrics. But, this will only get you so far since you will just be performing black box monitoring. How can you go to the next level and observe what’s beyond? They are an essential part of the day-to-day monitoring of cloud-native systems, as they provide an additional dimension to the business and app level.
