Yes, it’s that time of year again. As the New Year’s resolutions fade and the planning cycles kick-in, technical leaders in various organisations are often asked to get out the crystal ball to inspire our teams or steer an excited Board.

Today executives and customers expect IT and digital services to be available and performant at all times; compromised availability or performance is no longer tolerable. Think about it; when was the last time a digital service was unavailable and it didn’t make the news or social media? When was the last time you visited a website that was unavailable and you waited for the outage to be over, rather than finding an alternative in the moment?

When an IT or Security issue impacts a development team’s software how are they notified? Is your organization still relying on mass emails that lack context and most engineers have probably already filtered out of their inbox? Communicating between siloed tools and teams can be difficult. How would you like to put IT, Security, legacy processes, and business notifications specific to development teams right into one of their most important tools? Now you can!

Historically, software development and SRE have worked in silos with different cultural perspectives and priorities. The goal of DevOps is to establish common and complementary practices across software development and operations. Sadly, in some organizations true collaboration is rare and we still have a way to go to build effective DevOps partnerships.

Apache Tomcat is the Java web server that implements many Java features like web site APIs, Java server pages, Java Servlets, etc. It’s an open-source software widely used in the industry. Tomcat sits on top of your application and is the entry point for reaching your application code. It is crucial to monitor its performance and make sure everything works, get notified when unexpected errors occur, and take action in real-time.

Log management tools improve security, help troubleshoot issues, and enable system monitoring. This log management guide defines key terms and explains the benefits of centralized tools.

Google Cloud Ops Agent now supports monitoring GCE instances with Prometheus.