Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Azure is the cloud service provider of choice for a variety of reasons – such as its ease of use, its wide variety of services, the strong community around it and its integration with other Microsoft services. While Azure comes with native data visualization solutions such as dashboards and workbooks, they require a significant amount of Azure knowledge to create and maintain.

Load testing is an extremely valuable practice for assessing how your application will actually perform in production. Whether you're expecting a handful of concurrent users or anticipate thousands, it's important to have an idea of the kind of loads that will be placed on your systems and be aware of where bottlenecks or saturation may occur.

Zendesk is one of the most popular customer service platforms, known for its ease of use, robust ticketing system, and powerful automation capabilities. While Zendesk comes with native reporting and dashboards, they can be limited in terms of customization and data correlation across different sources. Additionally, building complex visualizations in Zendesk often requires more advanced knowledge of their reporting tools. This is where SquaredUp comes in!

Since we added the Open Access feature to Dashboard Server way back in 2014, it has been a customer favourite. Build a dashboard, grab a special URL, and share it with anyone without getting into the costs and hassle of user management - useful for embedding in other tools, show it off it on a very visible wall monitor, or send to management for a monthly report. It's versatile, simple, and most importantly, affordable.

Most of the time, the dashboards we create are querying data from SQL databases, Web APIs or large backend systems. Sometimes though, we might want to visualize an ad hoc data set – and this is where the SquaredUp CSV plugin really shines. You can create powerful dashboards just by pointing to the path of a CSV file, or even just paste your CSV data into a text box.

Azure DevOps and its extensive feature set helps teams plan smarter, collaborate better, and ship faster. With several integrated features such as Azure Pipelines or Azure Repos, it gives you the flexibility to use just what you need to complement your existing workflows. However, as your usage of Azure DevOps grows, you might find that monitoring and observing key CI/CD metrics across these services gets increasingly challenging.

If you're a Microsoft shop, it is a given that you have loads of SQL databases lying around with critical data in them. SquaredUp lets you connect to your SQL database and run SQL queries on the database to fetch data and build dashboards with it. Let's see how.

If you are part of an engineering team, monitoring the performance of your CI/CD pipelines is a high priority. With the SquaredUp GitHub plugin you can view key metrics for your GitHub repos and workflows all within a single pane of glass. We also have plugins for Jira, Circle CI, Azure DevOps and more. So even if you are using many different tools you can still get an end to end view of your processes.

As an Azure admin, it is of critical importance that you keep an eye on how much cost you are incurring running your workloads in the cloud. You also want to have sight of any deployed resources that are not contributing to business and accumulating cost over time. Using a dedicated Azure plugin, SquaredUp dashboards will help you understand your Azure costs across services, resources, locations and apps – so you can keep tabs on how much you're spending and identify opportunities to save costs.

So you had a great day playing with really awesome new tech, solving big business challenges, and feeling like you really nailed it. Then you wake up the next day to an alert from Azure telling you you've blown your monthly budget and its only the first week of the month. We've all been there... right? Using any cloud service comes with a cost, but for most services the budget risk is low. Cost calculated daily isn't a problem when usage is predictable, but not everything works like that.