Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When it comes to building reliable and scalable software, few organizations have as much authority and expertise as Google. Their Site Reliability Engineering Handbook, first published in 2016, details their practices to maintain reliability as Google scaled. But when you have over a million servers running thousands of services across more than twenty data centers, how do you monitor them in a consistent, logical, and relevant way?

Nowadays, organizations address a high volume of incidents everyday. With so much happening, responders can be overwhelmed by the volume of incidents and may end up de-prioritizing certain important incidents. Hence, it is important to have an efficient on-call scheduling and escalation process in place. In this blog, we will explore how Round Robin Escalations can help distribute on-call load and set up efficient on-call schedules. This blog covers the following pointers.

Logs are key to monitoring the performance of your applications. Kubernetes offers a command line tool for interacting with the control plane of a Kubernetes cluster called Kubectl. This tool allows debugging, monitoring, and, most importantly, logging capabilities. There are many great tools for SREs. However, Kubernetes supports Site Reliability Engineering principles through its capacity to standardize the definition, architecture, and orchestration of containerized applications.

Organizations scramble to adopt new frameworks and methodologies to make the software more scalable. Plus, they need to do it in a reliable way that doesn’t cause more problems. Enter Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), a set of practices introduced by a Google engineer. But how does it stack up to frameworks like DevOps? DevOps and SRE both enhance the software development and product release cycle.

Healthchecks is a cron job monitoring service which listens to HTTP requests and email messages ("pings") from your cron jobs and scheduled tasks ("checks"). It lets you update your job to send an HTTP request to the ping URL every time the job runs. When your job does not ping Healthchecks.io on time, then you will receive an alert! If you use Healthchecks for your monitoring needs, you can now integrate it with Squadcast to route detailed alerts from Healthchecks to the right users in Squadcast.