Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Distributed systems such as microservices have defined software engineering over the last decade. The majority of advancements have been in increasing resilience, flexibility, and rapidity of deployment at increasingly larger scales. For streaming giant Netflix, the migration to a complex cloud based microservices architecture would not have been possible without a revolutionary testing method known as fault injection. With tools like chaos monkey, Netflix employs a cutting edge testing toolkit.

Trying to work out the best security tool is a little like trying to choose a golf club three shots ahead – you don’t know what will help you get to the green until you’re in the rough. Traditionally, when people think about security tools, firewalls, IAM and permissions, encryption, and certificates come to mind. These tools all have one thing in common – they’re static.

Marketing and Site Reliability teams rarely meet in most organizations. It’s especially rare outside the context of product marketing sessions or content creation. With observability now pivotal to success, we should be looking to bring the two together for technical and commercial gains. In this piece, we’re going to explore the meaning of observability and its relevance to marketing metrics.

This hands-on Flux tutorial explores how Flux can be used at the end of your continuous integration pipeline to deploy your applications to Kubernetes clusters.

Why do organizations invest in observability? Because it adds value. Sometimes we forget this when we’re building our observability solutions. We get so excited about what we’re tracking that we can lose sight of why we’re tracking it. Technical metrics reveal how systems react to change. What they don’t give is a picture of how change impacts the broader business goals. The importance of qualitative data in business observability is often overlooked.

“What is GitOps?” – a question which has seen increasing popularity on Google searches and blog posts in the last three years. If you want to know why then read on. Quite simply, the coining of GitOps is credited to one individual, and pretty smart guy, Alexis Richardson. He’s so smart that he’s built a multi-award-winning consultancy, Weaveworks, and a bespoke product, Flux, around the GitOps concept.

Programming is often thought of purely as a problem-solving activity. This may be true for the lone coder in their garage, but in the multi-person environment of an Agile team, such problem solving must be collaborative. In this article, we’ll look at the role of communication in software development, particularly in an Agile framework. Covid-19 has forced an unprecedented shift to remote working so we’ll finish up with a discussion of how Agile can be implemented in a remote setting.

Consider for a moment that you are building a webpage that displays data stored in Elasticsearch. You have so much information in your index that your API Gateway cannot handle it all at once. What you’ll need to do is paginate your results so that the client can have a predictable amount of data returned each time. Before paginating your results with your client, you will need to know how to paginate data in your backend storage.

Metrics measuring user engagement on your website are crucial for observability in marketing. Metrics will help marketing departments understand which of your web pages do not provide value for your business. Once known, developers can look at the web page’s technical metrics and determine if updates are required. Typically user engagement statistics, like the average time required to load your page, are stored separately from technical site logs.

For the seasoned user, PromQL confers the ability to analyze metrics and achieve high levels of observability. Unfortunately, PromQL has a reputation among novices for being a tough nut to crack. Fear not! This PromQL tutorial will show you five paths to Prometheus godhood. Using these tricks will allow you to use Prometheus with the throttle wide open.