Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When making changes to applications these days, it’s hard to understand and predict the impact of those changes before you deploy. API connections are multiplying, and with new cloud platforms such as containers/serverless, it only add to the complexity. Some people have trouble remembering whether they closed the garage door or turned off the coffee maker. Can you remember all the details of your latest API contract change? Let alone who would be impacted and needed to be notified?

We recently ran a quick poll where we asked the audience, “When an IT incident occurs at your company, what TV show does it most resemble?” Twenty-three percent of respondents told us that CSI: Crime Scene Investigation resembled them the most. We needed to dig into that a little deeper. Let’s walk through the typical steps of figuring out the root cause, in CSI fashion: Photographs are critical in the world of CSI.

As companies are increasingly built in the cloud, cost management has become a major issue for many engineering teams. While cloud providers like AWS offer flexibility and easy scaling, cloud costs can be opaque and difficult to track. As a result, many companies that rely on the cloud are adopting cloud cost management strategies to understand and manage the charges associated with their cloud-based technology, and maximize cloud usage and efficiency.

On October 22, 2020, Shipa launched a new web series called “Coffee & Containers.” C&C was conceived as a place for practitioners and IT leaders to learn and collaborate on all things microservices, cloud-native, containers, Kubernetes, etc. We were very proud to launch this series with Kelsey Hightower, Thought Leader and Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform, and Bruno Andrade, Founder and CEO of Shipa.io.

One thing that 2020 has clearly shown us is that communications services is a basic and fundamental driver of our global economy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we realized that many tasks can be done at home, if access to communications services is sufficient. Many of us can work from home or other locations outside of the traditional office; students do not have to be physically present at school to participate in lectures; and we don’t need to go to movie theaters watch a new film release.

Nowadays developers are in the driver’s seat regarding a lot of decisions for the tools they use. In this update from Tyler Jewell, he covers what he sees are the Top 5 trends that will take place this year. While it’s a bit of a crowded chart, he plots the companies that he sees driving these trends. If you drill into the Service Catalog trend, Jewell sees a couple of different groups working on ways to help developers deal with the deluge of Services (aka APIs).

There’s no better time than now to dedicate effort to reliable software. If it wasn’t apparent before, this past year has made it more evident than ever: People expect their software tools to work every time, all the time. The shift in the way end-users think about software was as inevitable as our daily applications entered our lives, almost like water and electricity entered our homes.

To incentivize reliability in your platform, there should be shared goals across your team to measure & quantify the capabilities of your product/service along with customer experience. Define the path of "Always-On" services by understanding few key SRE fundamentals and their implications - SLIs, SLOs & SLA. Framing SRE metrics for building or scaling a product is quite a daunting task.

This article is a full tutorial on HAProxy monitoring and the best tools to get it done right. We will be looking into how to collect HAProxy metrics using a collectd daemon, push them into Graphite and visualize them in Grafana. To follow the steps in this blog, sign up for the MetricFire free trial, where you can use Graphite and Grafana directly in our platform.