Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Grafana’s plugins are a quick and simple way to extend Grafana’s dashboard plugins and data sources.

Different development teams exercise different production philosophies. These philosophies usually stem from greater company direction and culture but are guided by the experience of technical leadership. Aumni has built a unique technology solution to unlock data insights into investment auditing and due diligence for VCs. They need to remain nimble and develop great code (areas 1 and 2) but reduce the probability of user-facing errors and the time spent detecting and fixes new issues (area 3).

“All code and no logging makes John a black box error-prone system.” Logging is a key aspect of monitoring, troubleshooting and debugging your code. Not only does it make your project’s underlying execution more transparent and intelligible, but also more accessible in its approach. In a company or a community setting, intelligent logging practices can help everyone to be on the same page about the status and the progress of the project.

Forecasting health is vital in today's society. Who has the highest risk of getting a virus? Are you able to predict when this will happen? Knowing answers to these questions could save many lives. Forecasting the health of IT infrastructures is equally essential. Think of identifying databases that are about to stop serving requests in a timely matter, hard drives that are about to run out of space, or Service-level agreements (SLA's) that are about to cross the set thresholds.

That is a common question I see among developers. Most of the time, nobody cares about system logs. But when things go south, we absolutely need them. Like water in the desert, sometimes! At Dashbird, we have a list of criteria compiled to determine a reasonable retention policy for application logs. There is no one-size-fits-all, though. The analytical dimensions below will give a relative notion of how long the retention period should be.

With the rise of cloud computing and modern distributed systems, we also witnessed the rise of a new practice area: DevOps. Despite being fundamental for smooth cloud operations, a dedicated DevOps practitioner is a luxury most teams can’t afford. Salaries average $130K in San Francisco, for example. When a dedicated DevOps practitioner is not available in our team, what should we do? The answer could unfold a multitude of aspects.

Web proxies intercept traffic from your systems as they move to other systems, analyze the packets, then send the data along. There are a lot of reasons why you might want to intercept packets. Originally the main use case for a proxy was as a caching server. In this use case, the first time a person in your network goes to a website, the static content (particularly graphic images) gets downloaded and cached. Then, because the content is local, the next person to hit that site will get a fast response.

Uh oh, the site’s certificate has expired. How do we generate a new one? Where’s the private key? Which servers need the new cert? What even goes in the cert? If this sounds all too familiar, rest assured you’re not alone. Outages due to expired certs are far too common and it happens to sites of all sizes (one recent example includes Microsoft Teams going down for several hours due to an expired cert). Disruptions like this are entirely preventable with proper monitoring in place.