Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Telegraf is a server-based agent for collecting all kinds of metrics for further processing. It’s a piece of software that you can install anywhere in your infrastructure and it will read metrics from specified sources – typically application logs, events, or data outputs.

In a recent experiment with my colleagues, I polled them about the following: “What would they do if the lights went out as you worked at night?” Besides identifying the funny and who-you-want-in-case-of-an-emergency responses, most of my colleagues checked to see if the problem might be broader than their own home.

When migrating to Kubernetes and re-architecting your applications into containers, logging is a critical piece to consider. The twelve-factor app methodology has a section dedicated to logging and outlines the importance of not worrying about routing and storage of your logs. As a best practice, applications running in containers should rely 100% on standard output (STDOUT). Unfortunately, getting logs from applications that do not write to STDOUT is non-trivial and has many things to consider.

It’s essential to choose the right tool for the job. I have an old, sturdy screwdriver that I use for lots of odd DIY jobs around my house, like cleaning gutters, opening paint cans, and general maintenance on my lawnmower. However, when I’m performing an upgrade on my computer, a large, rusty screwdriver isn’t the best tool to remove the screws anchoring my motherboard.

If your team falls into the majority of organizations that use NGINX – which remains the world’s most popular Web server – to host websites and Web applications, monitoring NGINX usage, performance, and transactions is critical for maintaining a positive end-user experience. Keep reading for tips on doing so. This article identifies the most important metrics to monitor for NGINX in order to understand key usage and performance trends within NGINX transactions.