Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Logs and tracing: not just for production, local development too

We're a small team of engineers right now, but each engineer has experience working at companies who invested heavily in observability. While we can't afford months of time dedicated to our tooling, we want to come as close as possible to what we know is good, while running as little as we can- ideally buying, not building. Even with these constraints, we've been surprised at just how good we've managed to get our setup.

A New Kind of Employee Experience

When you read the phrase “employee experience” (or even just good-old “user experience”), what comes to mind? One of the first things most of us think about, at least in an IT setting, is probably a system’s user interface. How hard or easy is the software to use? How intuitive is it? How appealing is its design? These are important considerations, but a good experience requires more than a good interface.

Incident Review - Rolling Comcast Outage Disrupts Work from Home for Millions of Users Across the U.S.

The rolling Comcast outage on Monday, November 8th and Tuesday, November 9th affected customers across the U.S., knocking users offline around the country. The first wave took place Monday evening in the San Francisco Bay area. The second, which had a wider geographic impact, occurred Tuesday morning, primarily affecting broad swathes of the Midwest, Southeast, and East Coast.

Serverless Observability: It's easier than you think!

Observability is a measure of how well the internal state of a system can be inferred from its external outputs. It helps us understand what is happening in our application and troubleshoot problems when they arise. It’s an essential part of running production workloads and providing a reliable service that attracts and retains satisfied customers.

The payoffs of Agile project management

The concept of project management isn’t new, but project management is in the spotlight today. Why? Organizations everywhere face enormous pressure to consistently identify, develop, and launch the right solutions, products, or services to address market realities and enable digital transformation. A key factor to success is using the right delivery methodology and, increasingly, the answer is Agile.

Avoid frostbite: Stop doing code freezes

As the holiday season aggressively approaches I want to perform a public service announcement for everyone toying with the idea of a code freeze for the holidays: please don't. It’s getting cold outside and the season of peppermint mochas is upon us, which might get you thinking about putting a code freeze in place for the holidays. A Word of warning: instituting a code freeze may have unintended consequences.

Why and how to monitor AWS EKS

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, or EKS, is a managed Kubernetes service. That means that Amazon Web Services (AWS) handles some of the deployment and management tasks for users. But the fact that EKS is a managed service doesn’t mean that AWS manages all administrative tasks. One key management task that isn’t fully covered as part of EKS is monitoring.

Website Performance Monitoring and Optimization Best Practices

Websites are a must-have for any business that wants to survive in a highly competitive environment. Many people mistakenly think that only e-commerce projects need a website, but this is not the case. Absolutely every company needs website performance monitoring and virtually every initiative should be armed with its own webpage. But this article is not about why you need a website, but about how to track and manage its performance.

InfluxDB and GeoData - Emergency Generators

With the widespread use of LTE (Long Term Evolution), we are seeing more IoT devices come online in remote regions of our planet. Picture this scenario: A country is currently experiencing a national emergency due to an electrical grid failure. To mitigate the power shortage the government has deployed generators in the remote regions of their country to power the most remote villages. The problem? The villages are still reporting outages due to the emergency generators running out of fuel.

Snowflake vs Redshift: Which is the Right Data Warehouse for You

A plethora of surveys has shown that there is significant growth in the digital data that enterprises generate every day and it is becoming difficult for traditional on-premise systems to cope up with the enormous amounts of data. Also, the old methods require huge capital and resources. Therefore, Cloud-based Data Warehouses are taking the place of traditional ones to collect, store and analyze data coming from multiple sources.