Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We eat lots of our own dog food at MetricFire, monitoring our services with a dedicated cluster running the same software. This has worked out really well for us over the years: as our own customer, we quickly spot issues in our various ingestion, storage, and rendering services. It also drives the service status transparency our customers love. Our customers include large multinational coffee brewers, game companies, and other data science/SaaS companies.

An incident can take many forms. It can look like a small issue that locks a few customers out of their accounts or a huge catastrophe that brings down your entire product for a full day. How you respond to the incident should vary based on the impact of the incident. And that’s where severity comes into play. Defined severity levels are crucial to any good incident management program.

Everyone’s talking about Platform Engineering these days. Even Gartner recently featured it in its Hype Cycle for Software Engineering 2022. But what is Platform Engineering really about? Is it the next stage in the evolution of DevOps? Is it just a fancy rebrand for DevOps or SRE? As a veteran of the PaaS (Platform as a Service) discipline about a decade ago, and a DevOps enthusiast at present, I decided to delve into this topic, peel off the hype, and see what it’s about in practice.

IT admins face pressure from all sides. Besides tracking and securing data across devices, they must also manage a changing inventory of physical and digital assets while adhering to an executive directive to make technology an enabler for growth. Software deployment can be a particularly daunting task. Deploying software through an automated solution is just a click of a button, but what are the don’ts to keep in mind?

Containers have been the buzz among developers in recent years with the adoption of cloud-native orchestration tools like Kubernetes and DevOps workflows centered around containers. At the same time, virtual machines (VMs) still power many enterprise workloads, whether they’re running in a public cloud provider like Azure or an on-premises data center running VMware. In one of my early jobs, we built a private cloud—in 2012. This was a ground-breaking project at the time.

For software development teams to make meaningful progress, they must invest in efficient monitoring, reporting practices, and tooling. This is because only by keeping track of select metrics, such as those pertaining to application performance, will you know whether you are on the right track. Without knowledge of whether the software is functioning and performing as it is supposed to, there is no way of knowing what, if any, changes need to be made.

Cyber Essentials is a UK government backed scheme, developed by the National Cyber Security Centre. Since its inception the scheme has become the benchmark for IT security, helping organizations to deploy technical controls to guard against the common types of cyber-attacks and improve data security.