Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Modern businesses depend heavily on Software as a Service (SaaS). Almost all aspects of business operations - accounting, HR, payroll, marketing, IT, sales, support - depend on one or more SaaS applications. SaaS is not limited to being used by software development teams. Given this dependency on SaaS applications, their uptime becomes tightly tied to a business's uptime. Any SaaS downtime can affect both a business's daily operations as well as the user experience.

API monitoring has become increasingly important due to the growth of microservices, cloud-native architectures, and distributed systems. APIs play a crucial role in facilitating communication between systems, and even small API failures can cause significant disruptions in service delivery. This article delves into the best API monitoring tools available in 2024, encompassing both proprietary and open-source options, to assist you in selecting the most suitable solution for your business requirements.

When DNS Says: Talk to the Hand! What? This started with a post on social media, which created a discussion among us industry professionals. The following conversation happened when I got to talk to my coworkers about some interesting things regarding DNS responses. Putting us gearheads in a room always results in an interesting comment or two!

Kafka is a beast when it comes to handling data streams at scale. But when your Kafka setup grows into a massive cluster, keeping it running smooth? Yeah, that can feel like trying to tame a tornado. Imagine hundreds, maybe thousands, of brokers, topics, and partitions—all moving data at lightning speed. The moment one thing slows down, you’re staring at bottlenecks that could trip up your whole system. It’s not pretty.

Most engineers will tell you this: Troubleshooting today feels like trying to find your way out of a wild jungle, in the middle of a storm, at night, while a countdown clock is running. In other words, it’s ambiguous, nerve-racking, and plain difficult. But should this be the norm?

Just as every organization should have a business plan, every organization should also have an IT strategy that supports that business plan. This article offers an overview of what an IT strategy is, what it does for an organization, and the key components that should go into an IT strategy.

Chaos Monkey is an open-source tool. Its primary use is to check system reliability against random instance failures. Chaos Monkey follows the testing concept of chaos engineering, which prepares networked systems for resilience against random and unpredictable chaotic conditions. Let’s take a deeper look.