Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Building dashboards that show real-time streaming data and allow for interactive queries is challenging. At the recent InfluxDays conference in San Francisco, Ryan McKinley, Grafana Labs VP of Applications, discussed new approaches to integrate real-time data into Grafana dashboards. Prior to joining Grafana, McKinley worked at a renewable energy startup, Natel Energy, which builds hydropower turbines. There, he used Grafana and Influx to display an overview of how the systems were working.

More than a decade ago, a small piece of code that would eventually be called Sentry was born. When I wrote this code, I didn’t know much about open-source, so when it came down to licensing, I just grabbed the first reasonable suggestion thrown my way. That suggestion happened to be the BSD 3-Clause License. Fast forward to today, and a lot has changed.

You can’t really blame most people for thinking employee surveys are a lost cause. Survey fatigue is a real thing, and every organization has its unique red tape when it comes to data collection and HR policy. If you can even manage to convince your employees to respond to that well-crafted questionnaire, how do you separate the signal from the noise and operationalize this information for ITOps?

BYOD stands for bring your own device, whereby your organization lets employees use personal devices for day-to-day work. Sounds simple, right? Unlike corporate devices where the enterprise has complete freedom to choose users’ device types and platforms, BYOD is a different case altogether. In BYOD environments, employees often use different devices manufactured by different OEMs running on multiple OS versions.

Metrictank exposes many metrics to aid with operating the software in production. As the metrictank team (the primary on-call team for metrictank at Grafana Labs) grows and onboards new people, and more customers deploy the software on their premises, we need to solve a few problems regarding the metrics exposed by metrictank.

It’s hard (if not impossible) to imagine production infrastructure without incidents. And service reliability can be highly dependent on how quickly and efficiently engineers are able to tackle these incidents. Reliability engineers are often faced with four questions... Sometimes the answers to these questions are surprising.

Traditionally, Quality Assurance (QA) has been a very manual process. Our QA teams do an amazing job running through test plans, finding critical bugs, and logging reports. But it can be a lot of work to run through the tests again and again, dig into the errors to provide the contextual information developers need to fix bugs quickly, and prepare the reports your developers need to find and fix errors in the codebase.

In this post, you’ll learn which metrics to keep an eye on to improve your application performance, how AppSignal works, and how to interpret the data it generates. Grab a stroopwafel, make yourself comfy, and let’s start!