Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The latest News and Information on DevOps, CI/CD, Automation and related technologies.

Why Admins HATE Their Backups

Many of us hate our backup environments. That’s because backups kind of suck, even with a backup product as great as IBM Spectrum Protect. As I said in another post, it’s the thing that everyone needs, but no one cares about, and most definitely can make your life crappy. Ask any backup admin, and I know they’ll agree. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Yep, they said the same thing, didn’t they?

Monitor AWS Step Functions with Datadog

AWS Step Functions is a service that abstracts distributed applications into state machines, with each state representing a component of an application. Not only does this automatically generate an architectural diagram of your application’s workflow, it also makes it straightforward to reorder your states as well as implement parallel execution, retries, and other tasks.

Is Kubernetes Delivering on its Promise?

A headline in a recent Register article jumped off my screen with the claim: “No, Kubernetes doesn’t make applications portable, say analysts. Good luck avoiding lock-in, too.” Well, that certainly got my attention…for a couple of reasons. First, the emphasis on an absolute claim was quite literally shouting at me. In my experience, absolutes are rare occurrences in software engineering. Second, it was nearly impossible to imagine what evidence this conclusion was based on.

Automation and changing needs, featuring Forrester

In an ever-changing world, the future of work is changing as well, and it has accelerated some areas of automation that we were already moving toward. I sat down with our guest speaker, Leslie Joseph, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development and Delivery at Forrester Research, for a webinar to discuss these questions and get a better understanding around how automation plays an important role in supporting companies through crises and preparing them for an uncertain future.

Understanding your application's critical path

Don’t wait for an incident to focus on reliability. Learn concrete steps for preventing incidents in the first place in our two-part series, Planning and Architecting for Reliability. It’s 3 a.m. You’re lying comfortably in bed when suddenly your phone starts screeching. It’s an automated high-severity alert telling you that your company’s web application is down. Exhausted, you open the website on your phone and do some basic tests.

Virtana Offers Cost-Effective, Plug-and-Play Alternative as NetApp Sunsets OCI Monitoring and Optimization Platform

San Jose, CA, September 15, 2020 —OnCommand Insight (OCI) users worried about ongoing support, updates, and upgrades for NetApp’s legacy tool now have an alternative platform to migrate to that is operational in 250+ of the largest enterprises as a future-proofing multi-cloud solution, proven to avoid disruption. OCI users can immediately transition to VirtualWisdom by Virtana with plug-and-play ease and financial incentives.

Repository Webhooks: Notifications for DevOps

Webhooks, so what are they good for? Well, quite a lot as it turns out! Webhooks are great for integrating Cloudsmith with other systems that you use, by sending data or notifications to other tools in your stack and helping to enable automation across your workflows. I know what you’re thinking, this sounds a lot like an API right? Well, not quite. Webhooks are almost like a sibling of an API call. So, what’s the real difference?

An Introduction to Testing Robot Code

The myriad of different fields that make up robotics makes QA practices difficult to settle on. Field testing is the go-to, since a functioning robot is often proof enough that a system is working. But online tests are slow. The physical environment must be set up. The entire system has to be in a workable state. Multiple runs are needed to build confidence. This grinds development to a halt.