Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The term DevOps is a combination of the words “development” and “operations.” In practice, DevOps is a collaborative approach to the work that is performed by an enterprise’s IT operations staff and their application developers. Collaboration and communication between these two teams, who might otherwise function separately, are meant to increase the speed and quality of product or application releases.

Today’s blog comes from Kevin Howell, CEO of UK partner – Howell Technology Group (HTG) about their work supplying secure cloud technologies and remote working solutions to government and regulated customers. HTG are a trusted industry leader in the UK, who offer virtual desktops, managed services and efficient modern workplace solutions. Their solutions are also available with the UK Government’s Digital Market place under the G-Cloud Framework.

The network is designed to connect the organization’s users, partners, customers and visitors, but those connections are useless without software. While applications run on internal servers, end points and the cloud, the performance of the network in large measure defines the performance of the application, and this performance is what user experience and application experience (AX) is based on.

Last week (7th September 2022) I spotted a post from EUC and Cloud Veteran Marius Sandu alerting his professional and social media networks to an outage of Azure Front Door that in turn meant a significant number of Azure services and resources were unavailable.

Those who have been paying close attention might have recently noticed small changes in sessions, browsers and platforms lists on Raygun. If you’re using RUM to diagnose user experience issues in different browsers and operating systems down to the detailed versions you will have seen that those details are not always available, with browser versions listed more generally as Firefox 102.0 or Chrome 103.0, for example.

As a DevOps engineer or SRE, you are often faced with investigating complex problems — mysterious application performance issues that happen intermittently or to only certain portions of your application traffic — that impact your end users and potentially your company’s financial targets. Sifting through hundreds or even thousands of transactions and spans can be a lot of tedious, manual, and time consuming investigative work.