Why do organizations invest in observability? Because it adds value. Sometimes we forget this when we’re building our observability solutions. We get so excited about what we’re tracking that we can lose sight of why we’re tracking it. Technical metrics reveal how systems react to change. What they don’t give is a picture of how change impacts the broader business goals. The importance of qualitative data in business observability is often overlooked.

“What is GitOps?” – a question which has seen increasing popularity on Google searches and blog posts in the last three years. If you want to know why then read on. Quite simply, the coining of GitOps is credited to one individual, and pretty smart guy, Alexis Richardson. He’s so smart that he’s built a multi-award-winning consultancy, Weaveworks, and a bespoke product, Flux, around the GitOps concept.

Programming is often thought of purely as a problem-solving activity. This may be true for the lone coder in their garage, but in the multi-person environment of an Agile team, such problem solving must be collaborative. In this article, we’ll look at the role of communication in software development, particularly in an Agile framework. Covid-19 has forced an unprecedented shift to remote working so we’ll finish up with a discussion of how Agile can be implemented in a remote setting.

Consider for a moment that you are building a webpage that displays data stored in Elasticsearch. You have so much information in your index that your API Gateway cannot handle it all at once. What you’ll need to do is paginate your results so that the client can have a predictable amount of data returned each time. Before paginating your results with your client, you will need to know how to paginate data in your backend storage.

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.

The widespread adoption of Agile methodologies in recent years has allowed organizations to significantly increase their ability to push out more high quality software. Previous development practices revolved heavily around centralized applications and infrequent updates that were shipped maybe once a quarter or even once a year.

Mean time to repair (MTTR) is an essential metric that represents the average time it takes to repair and restore a component or system to functionality. It is a primary measurement of the maintainability of an organization’s systems, equipment, applications and infrastructure, as well as its efficiency in fixing that equipment when an IT incident occurs. Key challenges with MTTR arise from just trying to figure out that there is actually a problem.