Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the world was a different place. The idea of a "smartphone" was still a novelty, and the mobile phone was primarily a tool for making calls and, perhaps, sending the occasional text message. Yes, we had "smart" phones, but they were simpler, mostly geared toward business users and mostly used for, well, phone stuff. Web browsing? It was there, but light, not something you'd do for hours.

Open source Zipkin offers a robust set of features that make it easier for developers to understand and optimize complex distributed systems. Distributed tracing is a technique you can use to trace and monitor requests propagating through a distributed system. It can work in environments where multiple services process a request, making it an essential tool for modern microservices architectures. Zipkin is an open source distributed tracing system for monitoring and troubleshooting complex systems.

The Raspberry Pi, a compact single-board computer, is widely used for DIY projects to industrial applications. These devices ship with a customized Linux distribution that differs from standard Linux, adding a layer of complexity for developers trying to troubleshoot application problems and dependencies.

One of the most effective ways to monitor a critical user flow on a website—or monitor the operation of a critical API that other applications depended on—is to adopt synthetic monitoring. Synthetic monitoring is an approach to monitoring websites and applications that simulates the actions of real users via browser automation. It mirrors the actions that a visitor may take on your website, say browsing an online shop, adding items to a shopping cart, and then checking out.