Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Chances are, most of your third-party cloud and SaaS dependencies are globally distributed and have many regions of operation. Chances are, your applications use a subset of a cloud or SaaS service. If you are monitoring such a service, why should you receive alerts for all regions or every single component in the service? E.g. if you use Digital Ocean, you might be using Kubernetes in their US locations (NYC and SFO). You would want to know only when there is an outage in one of these locations.

PagerDuty's Events API V2 lets you push events from your monitoring systems to PagerDuty. You can push such events when there is a triggered, updated, or resolved incident.

Why should you monitor your third-party Cloud and SaaS vendors if you are in SRE/Ops? As part of an SRE team, your primary responsibility is ensuring the reliability of your applications. What makes you responsible for monitoring services that you don't even manage? Third-party services are just like yours - with SLAs. And outages happen, affecting you as well as many others who depend on them.

How many monitoring tools do you have? Chances are at least 2-3. One tool usually does not cover all cases, and it’s usually a combination of self-managed and managed tools. Self-managed gives you more control over custom configurations and cost. Managed ones take away the headache of running it yourself. Prometheus is the de-facto standard for monitoring these days if you have a modern application stack and you want to manage your own monitoring.

If you have a software-based business, you are using at least a few cloud based tools. It does not matter if you are a solo developer, or part of a 50-member team in a large organization. Take this random list and chances are you are using at least half of them: Your entire business - irrespective of org or market size - including your development tools, collaboration/communication tools, infrastructure and hosting, monitoring, even email - is dependent on services that you don’t control.