Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I've never been on call before, and I'm not sure what to expect, or how I can best prepare for it. Will I need to upend my life just in case the pager goes off? And how should I best cope with getting paged? I've read Charity's piece on the opposite problem of wanting to stop being on call, but it didn't quite answer my question.

As your team grows, so do the rules and regulations you use to keep things organized. The same is true for systems, which grow in complexity as they grow in size. That complexity is difficult to manage on its own without the natural turnover that occurs in tech. Those who built and managed legacy systems, eventually go on to bigger and brighter things, either within the company or toward other opportunities.

API gateways are part of every modern microservice architecture. As their name already suggests, they are the gateway into your system; everyone who wants to access your service has to go through a gateway. In 2019, AWS announced HTTP APIs for its API Gateway (APIG) service. This was a big step to add more flexibility and lower latency to APIG. Before this release, you could only build REST APIs with APIG, which only helped when you wanted to create an API based on the REST architecture.

Logz.io alerts are a critical capability for our customers monitoring their production environment. By keeping a watchful eye for data that indicates an issue – like spiking memory metrics or 3xx-4xx response codes – alerting quickly notifies engineers that something is going wrong. Setting an actionable alert to immediately notify engineers of oncoming problems can be the difference between a minor issue and a major event with widespread customer impact.

We’re heavy end-to-end monitoring users here at Checkly and always experiment with how to architect our tests the best way. Over the past months, we’ve settled on a few workflows that make it much easier to spin up new tests, avoid code duplication, and make the entire test setup easier to manage. One of those strategies is to strictly separate concerns in our tests.

The excitement around GrafanaCONline 2022 continues to soar after another day filled with demos of new features and functionalities in Grafana 9, Grafana Mimir, and Grafana Tempo. Plus we learned how a mini arcade turned into a Grafana display; how Grafana transformed into a health tracker, and how, yes, Grafana can run Doom.

The value of log files goes far beyond their traditional remit of diagnosing and troubleshooting issues reported in production. They provide a wealth of information about your systems’ health and behavior, helping you spot issues as they emerge. By aggregating and analyzing your log file data in real time, you can proactively monitor your network, servers, user workstations, and applications for signs of trouble.

We're launching our new Getting Started page. This feature helps first-time users to set up their monitoring with AppSignal, as soon as they've signed up. Before we dive in, we'd love to share our beliefs about onboarding. All developers share these same “first-time” moments: Many of our customers start monitoring their applications for the first time with AppSignal, or experience new types of issues when scaling an application.

Users nowadays demand the greatest possible experience, which implies top-notch performance. Smooth scrolling, prompt interaction responses, a fast page load time, and flawless animations are all things they anticipate. Local profiling to identify performance issues is convenient, but it only provides a limited amount of information. While things may run smoothly on our high-end developer machines, the user may be dealing with poor hardware and a bad experience.