Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I have been using Grafana for almost four years now, and in that time it has become my go-to tool for my application observability needs. Especially now that Grafana allows you to also view logs and traces, you can easily have all three pillars of observability surfaced through Grafana. As a result, when I started working on the Elixir PromEx library, having Grafana be the end target for the metrics dashboards made perfect sense.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and Operations teams responsible for operating virtual machines (VMs) are always looking for ways to provide a more stable, more scalable environment for their development partners. Part of providing that stable experience is having telemetry data (metrics, logs and traces) from systems and applications so you can monitor and troubleshoot effectively.

The success of a business is dependent on two key components: a quality product/service that is being offered and a team that can market and communicate about that product/service effectively. However, that team needs to first be able to communicate with each other to brainstorm and strategize. With many businesses still working on a remote or hybrid model because of the global pandemic, digital communication has become an invaluable part of productivity.

Log exploration and analysis is a key step in troubleshooting performance issues in IT environments — from understanding application slow downs to investigating misbehaving containers. Did you get an alert that heap usage is spiking on a specific server? A quick search of the logs filtered from that host shows that cache misses started around the same time as the initial spike.

This is a basic introduction to Lambda triggers that uses DynamoDB as an event source example. We talk a lot about the more advanced level of Lambda triggers in our popular two-part series: Complete Guide to Lambda Triggers. If you want to learn more, read part one and part two. We’re going back to the basics this time because skipping some steps when learning something new might get you confused. It tends to get annoying, or it can even make you frustrated. Why?

The future of enterprise IT stacks is the cloud. In fact, according to a 2019 Gartner post, when we say “cloud infrastructure,” 81% of people really mean multi-cloud. Considering the analyst took this survey prior to the pandemic, we can safely assume that the number of companies with multi-cloud stacks is probably higher than this. Companies choose a multi-cloud strategy for a lot of reasons, including making disaster recovery and migration easier.