Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The CMDB Stages a Comeback with Insights from AIOps

The Configuration Management Database (CMDB) has always been a tricky beast to tame, despite having a longstanding presence in enterprise IT. Originally implemented to help track and manage ever-changing IT assets, the CMDB has a checkered past but is finally ready to shed its bad reputation thanks to new technology.

The concise guide to labels in Loki

A few months ago, I wrote an in-depth article describing how labels work in Loki. Here, I’m consolidating that information into a more digestible “cheat sheet.” There are some big differences in how Loki works compared to other logging systems which require a different way of thinking. This is my attempt to convey those differences as well as map out our thought process behind them. As a Loki user or operator, your goal should be to use the fewest labels possible to store your logs.

Extended retention for custom and Prometheus metrics in Cloud Monitoring

Metrics help you understand how your business and applications are performing. Longer metric retention enables quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year analysis and reporting, forecasting seasonal trends, retention for compliance, and much more. We recently announced the general availability (GA) of extended metric retention for custom and Prometheus metrics in Cloud Monitoring, increasing retention from 6 weeks to 24 months. Extended retention for custom and Prometheus metrics is enabled by default.

Azure MP part 2: Configuring monitoring

This is part two of our journey towards monitoring Azure resources with SCOM, using the Azure Management pack. In Part 1: Installation, we finished installing the Management Pack and managed to connect one of our subscriptions where the resources we want to monitor are. Now, let’s move on to configuring the monitoring for actual resources or services.

Monitoring your own infrastructure with open-source Graphite and Grafana

An infrastructure, especially if it is scalable, can become extremely complex to visualize and observe. If something goes wrong, it would be difficult to fully understand the problem without a great data monitoring strategy. Information related to CPU, RAM, and statistics about SSH or HTTP servers are critical to understanding the performance of your web-application.

Beyond SLAs: Getting to the Core of Service Delivery With XLAs

As a consumer, you most likely can agree that the overall experience in the buying process is equally, if not more, important than the product or service itself. Forbes actually says 73% of consumers say a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties. A haircut, a fancy meal, or a new pair of shoes were nice, but what if the hairstylist, waiter, or sales associate was rude to you? What if they weren’t attentive and treated you as if you were dispensable to the business?

Designing a flexible non-SQl query language without reinventing the wheel

There are tons of query languages. Yet, another query language was invented: the StackState Query Language, or STQL for short. Perhaps this raises some questions. Such as: Why did we not choose to implement SQL? Did we reinvent the wheel? How did we balance the complexity of the language against the time to implement the language? What's the learning curve of this new language? Let me share with you our novel approach.

Introducing Quick Start guides: Getting started with Elastic Enterprise Search for free

We recently released our new training Quick Start guides for the products in the Elastic Enterprise Search solution: Elastic Workplace Search and Elastic App Search. Each product is built on the Elastic Stack, so you can enjoy its speed, scale, and relevance without the heavy development and maintenance requirements of building your own search solution. Each 15-minute video tutorial provides everything you need to start creating powerful search experiences for your workplace, websites, and apps.

Configuring a SAML realm for role-based access control in ECE

Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE) makes it easy to manage your Elastic Stack deployments, just like role-based access control (RBAC) makes it easy to manage your users. Combining the two can really make an administrator's life much simpler. The intent of this blog post is to provide instructions for configuring a SAML realm for RBAC in ECE environments where Auth0 is used as an identity provider (IdP).

Kubernetes vs Docker

In an era where container technologies have taken the industry by storm, one of the most common online searches on the topic of containers is ‘Kubernetes vs Docker’. The relevance and accuracy of this comparison is questionable, as it is not really comparing apples to apples. In this blog post, we will attempt to clarify both terms, present their commonalities and differences, and help users better navigate the ever-growing container ecosystem.