Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Systems speak in data. Widespread digitization means systems communicate more than ever, while increasingly refined means of recording and interpreting their messages are revolutionizing IT management. Meanwhile, beyond the engine rooms of enterprises, our planet is trying to tell us something, too. In changing temperatures and rising sea levels, we see signs that our relationship with the natural world must change.

I am not going to spend too much time explaining how important database backups are, I assume we are past that point since you are already here, reading this. But let's start with the saying.

Oh Dear can perform many checks: uptime, broken links, scheduled jobs, DNS, and much more. We proud to announce that we’ve added a new check: sitemap monitoring. This check will make sure that the structure of your sitemap is correct. We’ll also check if each and every link it links to a page that returns a correct response. Whenever we detect a problem, you’ll be notified via one of our many supported notification channels.

Cloud migration has become a crucial strategy for businesses aiming to capitalize on scalability, flexibility, and cost-saving opportunities. As organizations transition from traditional data centers to cloud infrastructure, these companies can access advanced cloud services, enhance operational efficiency, and ensure seamless data and application management. However, cloud migration challenges can be difficult to solve.

In the modern software development landscape, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines have become essential. They automate the process of integrating code changes, running tests, and deploying applications. The efficiency and reliability of these pipelines are critical to the overall success of a software project, and CI/CD pipeline monitoring plays a vital role in maintaining and improving these attributes.

Observability costs are exploding as businesses strive to deliver maximum customer satisfaction with high performance and 24/7 availability. Global annual spending on observability in 2024 is well over 2.4 billion USD and is expected to reach 4.1 billion USD by 2028. On an individual company basis, this is reflected by observability costs ranging from 10-30% of overall infrastructure spend. These costs will undoubtedly rise with digital environments expanding and becoming ever more complex.

I first started my career in IT support back in 2003 when VMs where something that was “coming” rather than mainstream, so I had the privilege of witnessing the birth of VMs first hand when my company made the switch from bare metal to VMware GSX running on top of Windows Server 2003.

In previous roles I have been both an Engineering Manager responsible for a team, and a Program Manager responsible for branching strategy and process around CICD pipelines. In both of those roles (but for very different reasons), my product's build quality has been critical to product success. The obvious "why" to this is no builds, no product, but the real why is much more nuanced.

A vital aspect of working in IT is that you need to effectively monitor a broad range of KPIs and metrics to ensure the smooth operation of your IT infrastructure. IT dashboards streamline this process as they are specialized dashboards designed to offer insights and track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to numerous aspects of IT operations and infrastructure.

This article explains how to show cron jobs for all users and the current user on a Linux system. It covers ways to list cron jobs as a root user, view system-wide cron jobs, and check user-specific cron tasks. The article also explains how to read cron job formats and gives examples of common cron job setups.