Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

What’s the most wanted feature for a Node.js application? Well, high performance with no downtime is one of the top answers for this question. But how do you accomplish this? Monitoring is key to gain a better understanding of the health of your application. For example, by implementing monitoring, you can detect problems, such as a memory leak or long-running processes that block the Node.js event loop.

Thanks to 2020, many of us don't remember the last time we took a holiday or vacation. If you were able to get away from the office, kudos to you. Hopefully, 2021 will be kinder to us, and we can take some time to recharge. Whether you're a veteran DBA standing watch over million-dollar, mission-critical database systems or a jack-of-all-trades who maintains your organization's SQL Servers, Windows Servers, and all the other corporate IT assets, everyone deserves to take a relaxing holiday.

Logging and metrics may sound interchangeable, and you may think the information from one can be used in the same way as information from the other. But the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Logging and metrics are two concepts you must use both independently and together to ensure your infrastructure and applications operate at their best.

Application performance monitoring (APM) is an important monitoring practice used in tech organizations today, but it hasn’t always been this way. Until somewhat recently, the concept was seen by many as an expensive luxury. No longer, APM is an absolute requirement to keep today’s applications healthy and performant. “APM tool” was a phrase likely to raise many an eyebrow.

Container technology is catching on big-time in the federal government as agencies such as the USDA and the National Institutes of Health look to containers to simplify software development and reduce costs. Containers offer enormous advantages over traditional “waterfall” application development processes. A containerized approach makes it easier for developers to create and deploy software faster and with fewer errors.

When we look back on this rollercoaster of a year that was 2020, we’ve all faced some of the most unforgettable, challenging, and transformative experiences of our lives—and many of them are going to shape how we plan for the future. For businesses that had to discover new ways to keep operating, they’re revisiting derailed 2020 plans for the new year with detailed strategies to handle the unexpected.

Some of the earliest memories of my career involve getting spammed by hundreds of emails from monitoring systems. After managing to find an issue, I’d scroll through endless logs trying to find obscure bugs that are impossible to recreate. I’m sure you’ve been there. I’ve spent many hours, days, and even weeks pressing “Page Down” on my keyboard trying to find a clue pointing me toward the root cause. I’m here to tell you: there’s a better way.

The start of a new year brings the familiar sentiments of “New Year, New Me!” or in 2021’s case, “New Year, New Perspective.” Ushering in a new year provides an outlet for personal reflection but it’s also a time for organizations to review and establish their business objectives. As the new year kicks off, perhaps one of your organizational goals is to invest in a new IT Service Management (ITSM) solution.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) allow applications to communicate, interoperate, and share information with one another. APIs have been mainstays at companies like Google, Salesforce, and other smaller but innovative organizations for decades. Now, they’re also common in the public sector, with a wide range of agencies actively using hundreds of APIs.