What if I told you that monitoring network traffic is a lot less daunting than it actually seems? I think I have your attention. As a network has various moving parts, understanding it all can be a serious challenge. If something breaks or a component stops working correctly, implementing a quick troubleshooting process is essential. If you can't fix the issue right away, this could be detrimental for your end users, leading to more severe complications.

In today’s post, we’ll dive into how we, at AppSignal, solved a daunting engineering challenge. Giving you a look into the kitchen, this post will show you how we tested a new database in production without having to worry about errors/downtime. Alright, let’s get cooking!

Is it spring yet? Or spring still? Time sure is strange nowadays. At least we have a ton to look forward to in the next few weeks! Here are some of the most exciting Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community this month.

One of the major concerns when moving to the cloud is how to approach AWS S3 security. Companies may have moved their workflows to Amazon, but are still cautious about moving their data warehouse. And that is totally understandable. We have all heard about data breaches in companies like Facebook, GoDaddy, and Pocket. It’s important that access to information is done properly, in a limited and controlled fashion, to avoid such breaches.

As part of my job as a Senior Solutions Engineer here at Grafana Labs, I tend to pretty easily find ways out of technical troubles. However, I was recently having some Wi-Fi issues at home and needed to do some troubleshooting. My experience changed my whole opinion on logs, and I wanted to share my story in hopes that I could open up some other people’s eyes as well. (I originally posted a version of this story on my personal blog in January.) First, some background info.

Running and troubleshooting production services requires deep visibility into your applications and infrastructure. Virtual machines running on Google Compute Engine (GCE) provide some system logs and metrics without any configuration required, but capturing application and advanced system data has required the installation of both a metrics agent and a logging agent.

In my recent article Understanding Citrix Latency Metrics to Troubleshoot Remote Worker Issues, I explained some causes to “Citrix is slow” complaints and delved into the latency metrics that are available to assist with troubleshooting.

IT teams across the digital world are currently facing their biggest test yet. Ensuring that things are running smoothly when employees are working from home. And they’re doing a very good job at it. But, there’s always room for improvement right? If you’ve ever been a part of an IT team, you know the pain of jumping between multiple software tools, the effects of a broken down collaboration system and the struggle for visibility amongst team members.

H.L. Mencken once famously wrote, “…there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” More than just a pithy way to frame the entire concept of “cost containment” (whether network-specific cost, the broader category of IT, or the cost of anything else, to be quite honest), it’s an integral aspect of what I’ll be proposing in this and subsequent articles in this series.