Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Hybrid monitoring has increasingly become a priority in the SCOM community. A growing number of enterprises are running workloads both on-prem and in the cloud, with some of us creating new workloads in the cloud, and others engaging in a gradual migration to the cloud – a process that often takes place over a number of years. How can we deliver a complete monitoring strategy for our hybrid environments via SCOM?

Seed is a fully managed CI/CD pipeline for Serverless Framework applications. In one of our previous posts we looked at how to build a CI/CD pipeline for Serverless apps on AWS with CircleCI. Today, we’ll look at how to do the same with Travis CI. The purpose of these posts is to dive deep into real-world CI/CD setups, something which most of the tutorials out there skip. We’ll try to illustrate how to set up something similar to Seed but using Travis CI instead.

Every so often you need to schedule a snapshot on a virtual machine, whether that be a VMware virtual machine or a Hyper-V virtual machine, or even multiple virtual machines because someone or something is going to be changed and you need a quick way to roll them back to a running state, just in case things go belly up. It’s a very common task that administrators need to do.

Cloud costs can come with significant sticker shock, especially since many businesses do not have an easy way to track or predict actual cost before the bill arrives. However, there are several architectural changes that businesses can make that will help rein in cloud spend. In some cases, optimal engineering decisions should be made up-front, while in other cases certain areas should be monitored over time to identify opportunities to retool architecture and optimize cloud costs.

Did you know that CloudFormation tags don’t automatically propagate to some resource types? Chief among these are CloudWatch log groups, which means you can’t include them in your cost monitoring (via cost allocation tags) among other things. The only way to tag CloudWatch log groups right now is via API calls. You can do this with the AWS SDK, or using the AWS CLI. This is hugely inconvenient!

School’s out for… Autumn? That’s right, while you were avoiding the back-to-school rush at Office Depot, cutting the crusts off PB&Js, and taking the layers out of mothballs (confession: I have never seen let alone used a single mothball), Serverless Summer School began winding down and is now over for the season. Until next year, school-themed Stackery livestreams!

If you run Microsoft’s Hyper-V as your virtualisation platform rather than the ever popular VMware ESX then you probably want a way to manage your Hyper-V hosts as well as the virtual machines that reside on this. Well you can do a lot of the functions that SCVMM does with the free tool for managing Hyper-V, the Hyper-V Manager (which comes as part of the Windows Operating System). System Centre Virtual Machine Manager is also called System Centre VMM or SCVMM for short.