Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Monitoring indoor air quality with Airthings and Netdata. Understanding and measuring common contaminants and pollutants reduces your risk of air quality health concerns.

We eat lots of our own dog food at MetricFire, monitoring our services with a dedicated cluster running the same software. This has worked out really well for us over the years: as our own customer, we quickly spot issues in our various ingestion, storage, and rendering services. It also drives the service status transparency our customers love. Our customers include large multinational coffee brewers, game companies, and other data science/SaaS companies.

An incident can take many forms. It can look like a small issue that locks a few customers out of their accounts or a huge catastrophe that brings down your entire product for a full day. How you respond to the incident should vary based on the impact of the incident. And that’s where severity comes into play. Defined severity levels are crucial to any good incident management program.

Prior to joining N-able, I worked for MSPs that supported clients all over the island of Ireland. That career in IT started back in the last millennium (yes, I’m that old), when reactive support often meant hopping into the car and driving to a customer to resolve their issues in person and on some rare occasions jumping on a flight if the situation was that urgent.

Our inaugural SolarWinds Day event was a smashing success! From the announcement of our SolarWinds® Observability solution—which was built fully in the cloud—to important updates to our on-premises SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability solution, this was our biggest day of product launches since the founding of SolarWinds. It was exciting to be a part of the event and to see so many people participate and engage in the discussion.

Modern software applications involve multiple layers of code and services, working together to meet increasingly demanding user requirements. To achieve this, systems became distributed, providing improved scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity. However, this innovation brought new challenges to basic troubleshooting and performance monitoring to maintain the health of systems. It’s for these reasons that observability is trending.

Distributed tracing is the ability to follow a request through a software system from beginning to end. While that may sound trivial, a single request can easily spawn multiple child requests to different microservices with modern distributed architectures. These, in turn, trigger further sub-requests, resulting in a complex web of transactions to service a single originating request.

A digital platform may have billions of messages flowing through it each day, with real-time updates considered the standard by customers and enterprises. Ensuring that messages aren’t duplicated or lost in the process is an arduous task, and one that is the focus of IBM MQ, an enterprise-grade messaging solution that has been on the market for over 25 years.