Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The rapid pace of updates and upgrades to operating systems, software frameworks, libraries, programming language versions – a boon to the future of fast-paced software development, has also come to slightly bite us in the back because of having to manage these very many dependencies with their different versions across different environments.

Regardless of the SquaredUp product you use, the WebAPI tile is very useful when it comes to connecting to external data sources and showing them in your dashboards. It brings you closer to that single pane of glass dashboarding dream that we all have, which is why it is also one of our most used tiles!

Metrics measuring user engagement on your website are crucial for observability in marketing. Metrics will help marketing departments understand which of your web pages do not provide value for your business. Once known, developers can look at the web page’s technical metrics and determine if updates are required. Typically user engagement statistics, like the average time required to load your page, are stored separately from technical site logs.

For the seasoned user, PromQL confers the ability to analyze metrics and achieve high levels of observability. Unfortunately, PromQL has a reputation among novices for being a tough nut to crack. Fear not! This PromQL tutorial will show you five paths to Prometheus godhood. Using these tricks will allow you to use Prometheus with the throttle wide open.

Hybrid cloud architectures provide the flexibility to utilize both public and cloud environments in the same infrastructure. This enables scalability and power that is easy and cost-effective to leverage. However, an ecosystem containing components with dependencies layered across multiple clouds has its own unique challenges. Adopting a hybrid monitoring strategy doesn’t mean you need to start from scratch, but it does require a shift in focus and some additional considerations.

We surveyed nearly 1,000 developers across the U.S. to uncover key development trends and insights. Today’s businesses are software businesses. If there was any positive in 2020, it’s the power software has to allow us to continue in some “normal” sense. Learn how this survey uncovers how too many companies and their development teams still have a major blind spot when it comes to errors in their code.

For many software engineers and developers, using standard libraries or built-in objects is just not enough. To save time and increase efficiency, most developers build on work done by others. Whatever the coding problem, there is likely another programmer who has already created a solution for it. There is usually no need to repeat the problem-solving process. This principle is known as Do not Repeat Yourself or DRY.

An on-call schedule tells you and everyone in the team who will be the first responder when an issue happens in production. The on-call team member is responsible for investigating the issue, either fixing the issue herself or adding other people who can help fix it. Having an on-call schedule is important for building reliable systems because making someone responsible for production issues makes sure that they're not ignored.

Adding alerts across your monitoring tools is taking a proactive approach to reliability. But if there are too many alerts, then it can become counterproductive because team members will start ignoring alerts or remove the alerting altogether. Which is why you need a systematic approach to adding alerts and dealing with them.