Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Kubernetes work queues are a great way to manage the prioritization and execution of long-running or expensive menial tasks. DigitalOcean managed Kubernetes services makes deploying a work queue straightforward. But what happens when your work queues don’t operate the way you expect? SolarWinds® Papertrail™ advanced log management complements the monitoring tools provided by DigitalOcean and simplifies both the debugging and root cause analysis process.

This post’s mission is to answer what seems to be a simple question: “What is log analysis?” It doesn’t seem too hard to answer, right? Obviously from the name log analysis is the process of analyzing log entries. Case closed? Can we finish the post here? Well, not so fast.

While managers may not be the most technical colleagues in the building—or online, in the case of 2020—dismissing their lack of monitoring knowledge isn’t always helpful. Managers who understand the tasks their teams deal with daily can be a great asset to any company. But how can we know what managers need to know to sound like monitoring experts? Simple. Just ask.

Microsoft Azure has become the go-to cloud computing service for over 95% of Fortune 500 companies—and for good reason. Azure’s flexible and scalable cloud environment offers a secure off-premises solution for your business IT infrastructure, without the need to manage physical servers in your changing IT infrastructure. Azure allows you to manage servers, databases, applications, and more, all from one of Microsoft’s secure global cloud storage sites.

So SolarWinds® Pingdom® has alerted you to an issue—what do you do now? In this article, I’ll explain the features and capabilities of a full monitoring stack in SolarWinds and how you can use it to get to the bottom of a 3 a.m. Pingdom wake-up call. The Setup For our web service, we use a simple architecture of a front-end Flask application with a Postgres back end served behind an edge SSL-terminating NGINX instance on the DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes service.

The past year has emphasized the importance of digital experience, especially in service delivery. For organizations forced to adopt flexible remote work policies, the IT help desk has been instrumental in business continuity. If end users in your organization are still struggling to find the necessary resources to support their technology, or if IT is still adjusting to the influx of tickets and requests, it may be time to evaluate the foundation of your strategy.

SolarWinds® Pingdom® is an external synthetic monitoring agent designed to monitor your systems from the outside in. If you know what clues to look for, it can provide a great place to triage where a problem is occurring in the system. So how does a Pingdom call work, and how can you use it to debug what’s happening inside the system?

SolarWinds® AppOptics™ was designed from the ground up as a SaaS-based APM tool for cloud-native and traditional IT implementations. It provides out-of-the-box monitoring for applications and infrastructure through simple-to-install APM libraries and host agents. AppOptics makes it easy for multiple teams to quickly assess the health and performance of your applications regardless of how or where they are implemented.

First off, what is synthetic monitoring? What if synthetic monitoring meant monitoring whether or not something is real or fake…watch out Kardashians! Jokes aside, no, synthetic monitoring doesn’t monitor celebrity plastic surgery decisions. Synthetic monitoring is a kind of website performance monitoring that simulates user interactions with a site. A great synthetic monitoring tool instantly alerts you when an issue is encountered.

NGINX is one of the most popular web servers. According to nginx.com, it powers more than 400 million websites. It is, however, probably even more commonly used as a reverse proxy. Since it acts as a go-between for your application and your users, it’s important to properly monitor NGINX metrics. Sometimes you may find yourself trying to understand some performance degradation of the application while an issue may come from NGINX itself.