What's the first small thing to do in o11y that would teach me something, bring something valuable, and open the way for something else? Observability doesn’t have to be a big, company-wide project. It can be useful locally and individually. A little playing around can get you some crucial insight into how your software works. Try it as a team, or in a pair, or by yourself. It takes 3 steps: Step 1 is easy. The other two might take ten minutes, or maybe more like a day.
Knowledge managers have an ongoing challenge: They want to encourage customers to self-serve and quickly find answers to their questions. They also want to minimize frustration if customers can’t quickly find an answer. Delivering great self-service is key to customer experience. It’s in everyone’s best interest if a customer doesn’t open a case (or incident). But where is the line between keeping your customer happy and causing undue delays?
There is one universal truth about using Grafana: Dashboards are easy to create, but not-so-easy to organize. As organizations scale, there’s a high risk of unchecked dashboard sprawl, when dashboards become an unmanageable mess. As the number of users increase, so does their dashboard output. Our guide to dashboard management gives an overview of features that help with organizing dashboards, but there are still two pain points.
The term “essential” is thrown around pretty loosely these days. That new show about the hospital (no, not that one… not that one either… yeah that one) is advertised as essential viewing. A newly-released track by a hip hop artist that describes how little they need to release new tracks in order to live much, much better than the rest of us? That’s essential listening.
Given the strategic importance of the cloud and size of cloud expenditures, it’s critical for enterprises to have solid controls in place to manage it all. According to our latest research, however, while most organizations agree with that sentiment, very few have put it into practice. There are distinct but related disciplines that come into play: FinOps and cloud governance. In this two-part series, we explore current state of each.