Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When you’re operating a web application, the last thing you want to hear is “the site is down." Regardless of the reason, the fact that it is down is enough to cause anyone responsible for an app to break out into a sweat. As soon as you become aware of an issue, a clock starts ticking — literally, in some cases — to get the issue fixed. Minimizing this time between an issue occurring and its resolution is arguably the number one goal for any operations team.

At the turn of the 20th Century, enterprises shut down their clunky generators and started buying electricity from new utilities such as the Edison Illuminating Company. In doing so, they cut costs, simplified operations, and made profound leaps in productivity. The promise of modern cloud computing invites easy comparisons to those first electric utilities: outsource to them, save money and simplify.

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’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.