Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Great writers use metaphors to get their point across so let me give that a try real quick. Bugs are nasty little pests, mm’key? It’s hard to get rid of them but apart of just spraying poison everywhere, there are only a few options left. One of those options is using a natural predator to those bugs, a predator like birds. So birds can help you get rid of bugs. I work for a company called Dashbird that help developers debug their AWS Lambda applications. See what I did there?

I’ve just finished getting through security at O’Hare—what an adventure! There were crowds at the check-in, a long security line (luckily I had TSA pre-check), and what seemed like 500 gates I had to pass to get to my gate at the far end of the terminal. We all understand why there are security checkpoints at the airport. They ensure that only those people who belong at the gate are at the gate, and also that there are no malicious actors on airplanes. But why are there so many gates?

AWS is the most popular cloud platform for enterprises, and with good reason. Amazon has massive infrastructure around the world, and many years of experience with it. Whether your network is completely on the cloud or you have a hybrid network, using AWS saves your business a lot of money and physical space. You benefit from Amazon’s tremendous economies of scale, and a lot of the tedious work involved in maintaining a network can be delegated to them.

Find out how Cloudsmith + Helm combine to provide you with world-class support for the Kubernetes (k8s) ecosystem. Get your own private Helm repository today.

During our deployments we come across all kinds of different organizational infrastructures. Importing users from the Active Directory is a key component to populating user information into Enterprise Alert. Enterprise Alert will only import users that are contained in security groups. However, we often see companies having users placed in distribution lists. Enterprise Alert will not import distribution lists.

Spring has finally sprung! I realize that was a groaner, but new features are no joke – using them will simplify your troubleshooting process and open up time for all the cool tasks you want to do. Besides parsing logs, of course.

Remember Microsoft’s trusty assistant, the annoying/endearing Clippy? We built something similar for the modern web, minus the annoying parts, and discovered that, if done right, it can increase user engagement and success with your product.

As the first part of a three-part series on Apache Kafka monitoring, this article explores which Kafka metrics are important to monitor and why. When monitoring Kafka, it’s important to also monitor ZooKeeper as Kafka depends on it. The second part will cover Kafka open source monitoring tools, and identify the tools and techniques you need to further help monitor and administer Kafka in production.

Open source software adoption continues to grow within enterprises (even for legacy applications), beyond just startups and born-in-the-cloud software. In this second part of our Kafka monitoring series (see the first part discussing Kafka metrics to monitor), we’ll take a look at some open source tools available to monitor Kafka clusters. We’ll explore what it takes to install, configure, and actually use each tool in a meaningful way.

Monitoring Kafka is a tricky task. As you can see in the first chapter, Kafka Key Metrics to Monitor, the setup, tuning, and operations of Kafka require deep insights into performance metrics such as consumer lag, I/O utilization, garbage collection and many more. Sematext provides an excellent alternative to other Kafka monitoring tools because it’s quick and simple to use.