Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Whether or not you made the journey to this year’s re:Invent, there’s always a variety of great announcements lost amid an action-packed week of keynotes, breakouts, expo hall demos, and networking sessions. No need to worry—we’re always happy to be a big part of the re:Invent experience and share our observations with you.

For organizations that leverage AWS resources, CloudWatch is a “must-have.” Operations teams leverage data from their AWS environments to identify service issues and maintain availability. By using CloudWatch and its associated products, organizations can monitor their AWS resource usage to optimize their environments.

This holiday season, AWS made waves by dropping a bombshell announcement: “AWS does not permit the sale of reserved instances (RIs) obtained through a discount program (per AWS Service Terms 5.5).” In other words, AWS is banning the resale of discounted RIs in their RI Marketplace. (See the full policy here, section 5.5.) The ban officially goes into effect on January 1, 2024.

Effective EKS monitoring is crucial for maintaining the health and performance of containerized applications deployed in the cluster. In this tutorial, we will set up EKS monitoring with OpenTelemetry. We will build monitoring dashboards for node and pod-level metrics with data collected by OpenTelemetry. We will use SigNoz, an open-source OpenTelemetry-native APM, as a storage and visualization layer for setting up dashboards.

The VMware ESX API is an essential tool for modern IT professionals tasked with managing VMware vSphere environments. This Application Programming Interface (API) acts as a bridge between the VMware ecosystem and various automation, scripting, and integration solutions, streamlining and enhancing the management of virtual infrastructure. At its core, the ESX API provides a powerful way to interact with the vSphere environment programmatically.

Werner Vogel’s keynote is usually the highlight of re:Invent and 2023 is no different. Although there were no noteworthy service announcements, Werner gave a timely reminder that cost is an important non-functional requirement and that we should all strive to be a frugal architect.

Welcome again to another BizTalk Server to Azure Integration Services blog post. In my previous blog post, I discussed how you can migrate a BizTalk request-response routing solution with LOB Adapters. Today, we are to address simple one-way routing solutions inside the BizTalk Server platform. In the realm of enterprise application integration, the concept of routing plays a pivotal role.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a plethora of cloud-based services that cater to various needs, from computing power and storage to machine learning and analytics. As organizations scale their cloud infrastructure, managing multiple accounts and services can become increasingly complex. This is where AWS Organizations comes into play.

While we built Grafana Loki as an open source log aggregation system that is cost effective and easy to operate, let’s face it: sometimes there is no time or bandwidth to mess around with self-managing and self-hosting. Luckily there’s the fully managed Grafana Cloud observability stack for log management. “Grafana Cloud is a no-BS platform. The engineering costs of hosting it ourselves would be much higher," says Jameel Al-Aziz, a software architect at Paradigm.

Event. Alert. Incident. These terms are bandied about, often interchangeably, in IT operations management. Broadly speaking, they all refer to situations where something is potentially amiss and needs to be investigated and resolved. Each of these three words does, however, have a distinct definition. Because they are used in scenarios where clear communication and timeliness are critical, it’s important to understand the differences and use them appropriately.