Your site or application runs on a server, which is just another computer inside some server warehouse. That server is subject to the same kinds of limitations as your personal computer, and you need a way to determine usage of those resources similar to the internal monitoring for disk space or CPU usage that you find inside a Windows or Mac operating system. These internal metrics collectively determine the power or capacity of your server.
You likely do not own your server, but you do have an interest in making sure the applications you run on your server remain responsive. You need to know the full story, and a combination of external and internal monitoring is how you get there. Marketers understand the word “responsive” to mean “capable of rendering on any screen”, but we can think about responsive in more fundamental terms.
Not all the waves we make are extreme. This is our fancy way of saying that we’ve been making a lot of small, behind the scenes updates lately targeting improvements to reporting and performance. For a full rundown, check out our release updates.
Monitis, once a stand alone monitoring solution, has become Teamviewer Web Monitoring. If you don’t like or don’t need the changes offered you may be looking for alternatives to Monitis. Monitoring is integral to your growing suite of web and application monitoring, and it can be difficult to find a replacement that will do everything you need in one software.
Let’s talk about The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and how it relates to DevOps. The game tasks our hero with finding three pendants, which unlock a Master Sword he can use to travel to an alternate realm and ultimately take down the bad guy. The US version of this SNES masterpiece came packaged with a fairly detailed instruction manual that contained an optional guide at the end to help locate the three pendants.
There is an idea of the relationship between observability and monitoring, that they complement each other in an inseparable way. While true that you can only monitor a system that is observable, the line dividing observability and monitoring grows narrower with every deployment you make; making these two practices less of a pairing and more a single entity.
The principle of fail fast is either the best thing since the transistor or nothing but hot air. It depends on the size of your organization and the cohesiveness of your teams. If your team members have a strong working relationship, and dev is well integrated with everyday work company-wide, you already have a good foundation for this particular agile thinking. Most companies that have grown beyond startup-size, and even some startups, may find this idea a bit jarring.
DevOps fits this odd niche between development and oversight. Like any “Wild West” type of position, pretty much anything goes. Your job is to think of everything including the stuff you haven’t thought of yet. You make the rules, and as long as the lights are on you’re considered a success. But alongside that freedom come the rumors and SLA myths that inspire such dread that you write them off as jokes.
Speed and function. Two words to live by when analyzing and optimizing your site, but 2021 comes with the need for an additional word: accessibility. From color blind accessibility in your UI, to increasingly detailed SLAs and speed requirements, where should you be spending your valuable resources to keep your competitive edge? Welcome to the future where, Time is Money, is relevant down to the millisecond.
Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) are part of the package when it comes to defining contracts, particularly with technology service vendors. An SLA serves to define the metrics, expectations, and penalties that the service provider will adhere to, and SLA reports create accountability.
