When I reference ServiceNow in discussions with DevOps and platform engineers they often look at me and quickly roll their eyes – with that bored look on their faces saying “next…” Why is that? At Cloudify, our DevOps automation platform primarily targets DevOps engineers, who were also locked in this mindset. Over the past year and a half, we started a deeper integration between Cloudify and ServiceNow, originally as a way to address a specific customer environment.

I have been building a feature on elmah.io lately that picks up validation results from an external API. Before serverless was a thing, I would probably have done this using a scheduled task or Windows Service using Hangfire or similar. But after having migrated everything to serverless Azure Functions, I wanted a good solution running similarly. Azure Durable Functions turned out as the perfect companion and in this post, I'll show you a possible way to implement polling of an asynchronous API.

Amazon CloudWatch monitors metrics of your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources in real time and can trigger alarms when a metric goes above or below certain thresholds. Typically, Amazon CloudWatch sends out alarms by posting a message to an SNS (Amazon Simple Notification Service) topic, which distributes the message via several mediums, including email, SMS, and Lambda functions. Setting a CloudWatch alarm can be complex.

One of the key attributes of DevOps and SRE engineers is their ability to meticulously observe and monitor all of their applications. A task which can be achieved more efficiently by centralizing all generated logs to a central endpoint. By centralizing logging, engineers can, at any time, have an accurate overview of all events which take place across their applications, from just one place. Storing logs in an external system also allows companies to ensure compliance with many certifications.