In the last decade, businesses have made massive investments in the digital economy with the goal of increasing operational efficiency and improving their customer or end-user experience. However, it isn’t rare for businesses to incur losses due to poor page load speed, failed transactions, or website errors. This is why businesses need to track end-user experience in real time and resolve issues quickly.

Depending on where you are on your journey with microservices, you may have noticed visibility into the system can be a bit tricky at times. Well, there’s good news. Not knowing what’s going on in the system is a solvable problem. One of the first things you can do is get your logs in order. And one of the best ways of doing so is aggregating your logs into a single logging service.

Network management, particularly the effective handling of system logs, is crucial in maintaining a high-performance and secure IT infrastructure. Log files, or simply logs, are generated by network devices such as switches and routers, serving as valuable resources to understand the intricacies of network performance, spot anomalies, and even comply with regulatory requirements.

Cloud platforms like Render have made developers’ lives easier by handling many of the underlying infrastructure concerns. You can deploy web services, spin up databases, and schedule cron jobs without ever setting up a server manually. However, this convenience comes with a challenge: Accessing logs across these disparate services takes time and effort. To overcome this challenge, many developers centralize their logs with a log management service.

In January 2015, I wrote about the future of professional database administrators (DBAs) in a three-part series of articles for Database Trends & Applications magazine. Back then I predicted we would see strong growth in DBA salaries because of the acute and persistent shortage of talent, very little means of training new DBAs, and a median age of DBAs creeping closer to retirement age with each passing year.

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) and traditional Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) are two approaches to service management within an organization. ESM serves as an extension of ITSM, bringing ITSM characteristics and capabilities to non-IT teams and departments.

Platform engineering started appearing in 2017 and was identified as a distinct DevOps role in 2019 in the book Team Topologies. Adoption quickly accelerates, and by 2022, there are platform engineering meetups worldwide, and over 6,000 DevOps professionals attend Platform Con, the first platform engineering conference. With such a fast rise in popularity, many technology professionals still need clarification on the role and how it fits into the DevOps methodology.