Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When teams collect data without full observability of what others on the team can see, it becomes clear that no one’s picture is truly accurate. In this picture, all of the people are wearing blindfolds and feeling around to see what is in front of them. One thinks this creature is a spear, another thinks it is a tree trunk, and another a rope. As long as they cannot observe what the others can, there is poor data fidelity.

Do you remember the classic board game where you have to go back and forth with your opponent deducing which characters on the board you’ve each selected? It’s still played by children today, and unfortunately by healthcare teams as well. Every day, healthcare teams are forced to play a game of “Guess Who?” is on-call if they do not have systems in place for role-based messaging.

A new era is here, where cloud computing is taking a growing share of the digital workspace market. Microsoft are well placed to capture an increasing part of this market to deliver digital workspaces to end users to run their business applications. Using Azure as the umbrella we see new Microsoft services arise each year. Last year the Windows 365 service was born with a Cloud PC service offering both Business and Enterprise subscriptions.

Monitoring distributed systems like MongoDB is very important to ensure optimal performance and constant health. But even the best monitoring tool will not be efficient without fully understanding the metrics it gathers and presents, what they represent, how to interpret them, and what they affect. That’s why it is crucial not only to collect the metrics but also to understand them.

Many people wonder what the difference is between monitoring vs. observability. While monitoring is simply watching a system, observability means truly understanding a system’s state. DevOps teams leverage observability to debug their applications or troubleshoot the root cause of system issues. Peak visibility is achieved by analyzing the three pillars of observability: Logs, metrics and traces.

Latency is the key differentiator when it comes to application performance on the internet. Reduced latency accelerates the delivery of apps. DNS resolving is the first step towards application delivery and it involves a series of steps. Prior to Anycast DNS, the DNS servers responsible for resolving users’ DNS requests were sitting continents away from many users, contributing to the high latency and slow delivery of applications.

Security is one word that is at the tip of everyone’s tongue when it comes to ensuring that web browsers are up to date. In August 2022, after zero day vulnerability CVE-2022-2852 was identified as a critical risk, Google issued a new set of Chrome security updates and tech-industry folks carried on with business as usual. In general, security vulnerabilities of all types are an all-too-common game of Whac-A-Mole. Once a security flaw is discovered and patched, another pops up to take its place.

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are an ongoing issue for communications service providers, putting critical systems at risk, undercutting service level agreements, and bringing unwanted headlines. In the first half of 2022 6 million of these attacks were reported. Some metrics of DDoS attacks in 1H2022 compared to 2H2021.

Most well established data teams have a clear remit and a well defined structured for what they work on and when: from the scope of their role (from engineer to analyst) to which part of the business they work with. At incident.io, we have a 2 person data team (soon to be 3) with both of us being Product Analysts.

Maintain high uptime and performance for your APIs without any overheads using Google Cloud’s API monitoring tools.