Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When developing web services and tuning the infrastructure that runs them, you’ll want to make sure that they handle requests quickly enough, and at a high enough volume, to meet your requirements. ApacheBench (ab) is a benchmarking tool that measures the performance of a web server by inundating it with HTTP requests and recording metrics for latency and success.

HashiCorp Consul is agent-based cluster management software that addresses the challenge of sharing network and configuration details across a distributed system. Consul handles service discovery and configuration for potentially massive clusters of hosts, spread across multiple datacenters.

In Part 1, we looked at metrics and logs that can give you visibility into the health and performance of your Consul cluster. In this post, we’ll show you how to access this data—and other information that can help you troubleshoot your Consul cluster—in four ways: Consul provides a built-in CLI and API that you can use to query the most recent information about your cluster, giving you a high-level read into Consul’s health and performance.

IoT, or the Internet of Things, has made its way into every corner of our lives. Once upon a time, the idea of an inescapable internet may have seemed like a far-off dream. Today, it’s our reality. Internet connected devices are everywhere—from our fitness trackers to our vehicles and appliances. These devices track our sleep patterns, enable us to set our coffee machines remotely, and find our pets after they have wandered off, among countless other tasks.

You can use our API to trigger an on demand run of both the uptime check and the broken links checker. If you add this to, say, your deploy script, you can have near-instant validation that your deploy succeeded and didn't break any links & pages. Our API allows you to trigger an on demand run for every check we do. But, it's an API - so it requires a set of IDs. First, let's find the different checks your site has.

I am delighted to announce a big new initiative that we have been working on here at Squared Up. Our engineers have been working their socks off to build a new product, Squared Up for Azure, and it’s shaping up very nicely. It’s not ready for you to play with quite yet, but we plan to have an early release available for enthusiastic testers in late September (sign up below!).