The latest News and Information on Monitoring for Websites, Applications, APIs, Infrastructure, and other technologies.
DynamoDB, the primary NoSQL database service offered by AWS, is a versatile tool. It’s fast, scales without much effort, and best of all, it’s billed on-demand! These things make DynamoDB the first choice when a datastore is needed for a new project. But as with all technology, it’s not all roses. You can feel a little lost if you’re coming from years of working with relational databases. You’re SQL and normalization know-how doesn’t bring you much gain.
Shipping complex applications at high velocity lead to increased failures. Longer pipelines, scattered microservices, and more code inherently lead to bigger complexity where small mistakes may cost you big time.
OK, first things first. I have to admit that I am, first and foremost, an old-school UNIX systems administrator. I’m that grizzled sysadmin in your shop who soliloquizes wistfully about managing UUCP for email “back in the day.” Centralizing Logs? Yeah, we had syslog, and saved it all off to compressed files.
Distributed tracing is a household term nowadays – if your house is an IT department! Modern enterprises use cloud-native applications for agility and responsiveness to customer needs. When monitoring cloud-native applications, distributed tracing follows how transactions perform while traversing services or containers in the backend architecture. By definition, we’re describing production applications with requests, methods, database calls and logs that accompany a transaction.
Have you ever experienced user complaints and struggled to find the root cause of the performance degradation? I'm sure every IT operations professional has. Is it the application? Is it the underlying infrastructure? Is it the network? What if you have a single pane of glass that will gather all the relevant metrics and telemetry and display it in an intuitive and easy to understand fashion?
