Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I have been following distributed tracing technologies — Zipkin, OpenTracing, Jaeger, and others — for several years, without deeply trialing with any of them. Just prior to the holidays, we were having a number of those “why is this slow?” questions about an express application, written in typescript, providing an API endpoint.

So you’ve got an app ready for launch, and unlike in the past where you simply ran it on-premises, this time you want to try the cloud. You know AWS is the leading cloud platform, and decide to give it a go. The first thing you’ll bump into as you learn about AWS is the various options of cloud instances available with AWS EC2.

As digital transformation accelerates across all industries, it has become increasingly important for businesses to get better, much better at the development and delivery of new software to drive revenue and engage customers in new ways. Ironically, most businesses are flying blind in how they track, benchmark and optimize their software development. Teams that consistently innovate and deliver new, high quality software quickly generate significant competitive advantage for their companies.

Platform architects, SREs, developers and DevOps staff for mission-critical modern apps know shaving 15 minutes off service incidents that take 20 minutes to resolve, four times a year, is the difference between meeting a 99.99% availability objective and missing it.

Today, social media uses a wide range of different social networking platforms to help its users with the creation and sharing of ideas, information, personal interests and hobbies by establishing virtual networks. Affiliates can benefit from these groups that use web-based applications to communicate, interact and connect. Affiliates participate by generating content, for example with comments, articles, photos, videos.

Since 2018, Watchdog has provided automatic anomaly detection to notify you of performance issues in your applications. Earlier this year, we introduced Watchdog for Infra, enhancing Watchdog to also monitor your infrastructure. We’re pleased to announce the latest enhancements to Watchdog, which now provides more visibility and greater context around the full scope of each application issue.

We’ve just launched Cortex 1.4.0, one of the most significant releases of 2020. The big headline: The new blocks storage engine has exited the experimental phase and is now marked as Generally Available. Blocks storage aims to reduce the operational complexity and costs of running a Cortex cluster at scale. In particular, it removes the dependency from a NoSQL database to store series indexes.

I’ve built web applications for 15 years. Some have succeeded and flourished, others have crashed and burned. But I’ve learned some hard-won lessons along the way: techniques that correlate with maintainable code and long-term success. Maybe they can help you.

If you work in Information Technology, you have doubtless encountered logs- in fact depending on your area of expertise, you may be inundated with them on a daily basis. Nearly every piece of digital technology produces some kind of log, from complex web applications to the drivers that power your mouse and keyboard. As such, the definition of what a “log” actually is, is necessarily loose; any output received from a piece of software could be considered a log.

In Kibana you have a full selection of graphical representations for your data, most of the time this can be a simple line or bar charts to do what you need to do. But every so often you need to take a different view to get the most out of your data. Heatmaps are a critical component of the Kibana visualization arsenal, and deserve their own attention.