Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Web proxies intercept traffic from your systems as they move to other systems, analyze the packets, then send the data along. There are a lot of reasons why you might want to intercept packets. Originally the main use case for a proxy was as a caching server. In this use case, the first time a person in your network goes to a website, the static content (particularly graphic images) gets downloaded and cached. Then, because the content is local, the next person to hit that site will get a fast response.

Uh oh, the site’s certificate has expired. How do we generate a new one? Where’s the private key? Which servers need the new cert? What even goes in the cert? If this sounds all too familiar, rest assured you’re not alone. Outages due to expired certs are far too common and it happens to sites of all sizes (one recent example includes Microsoft Teams going down for several hours due to an expired cert). Disruptions like this are entirely preventable with proper monitoring in place.

The global corporate landscape is on the brink of a complete premises lockdown in light of the COVID-19 crisis. Service disruption is inevitable, and enterprises’ business continuity plans are being put to the test. Despite this challenge, it’s heartening to see companies across nations take quick steps to ensure the health and safety of their employees during these trying times.

We’ve been working on something big. We’re building Request Metrics, a new service for web performance monitoring. TrackJS is a fantastic tool to understand web page errors, but what if your pages aren’t broken, just slow? What if the checkout page takes 10 seconds to load? What if that user API is slowing down from your recent database change? What pages have the worst user experience? Request Metrics will tell you that.

Monitoring has been around since the dawn of computing. Recently, however, there’s been a revolution in this field. Cloud native monitoring has introduced new challenges to an old task, rendering former solutions unsuitable for the job. When working with cloud native solutions such as Kubernetes, resources are volatile. Services come and go by design, and that’s fine—as long as the whole system operates in a regular way.

We’re really big fans of OpenTelemetry at Honeycomb. As we’ve blogged about before, OpenTelemetry is the next phase of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. Instead of working on separate but similar efforts, those two projects have merged to create OpenTelemetry. This is wonderful for the larger community as it gives people a clear way to instrument their code for metrics and traces that isn’t specific to any tool or vendor. OpenTelemetry is a CNCF sandbox project.