Debugging is the process of identifying, analyzing and removing errors in the software. It is a process that can start at any stage of the software development, even as early as the software has been written. Sometimes, remote debugging is necessary. In the simplest terms, remote debugging is debugging an application running in a remote environment like production and staging.
Alerts are notifications from AIOps monitoring tools that indicate that there is an anomaly. IT teams get these alerts on their monitoring dashboard via emails or enterprise collaboration tools such as Slack or Teams. Service level agreements expect IT teams to analyze every alert within a specific timeframe and take appropriate action.
Alerts are indispensable to any IT operations system today. Site reliability engineers (SREs) or ITOps executives set up several monitoring tools for their IT landscape. When there is a change, high-risk action, or outage in any of these incidents, the monitoring tool triggers an automated alert. This could happen on the monitoring tool’s dashboard itself, via email, or enterprise collaboration tools like Slack or Teams.
The most effective way to understand an incident, resolve it and prevent it from occurring again is root-cause analysis. Simply put, root-cause analysis is the study performed by ITOps teams or site reliability engineers (SREs) to pinpoint the exact element/error that caused the unexpected behavior. Based on this, they plan remediation. Accurate and timely root-cause analysis can have a direct impact on the company’s top and bottom line.
Should all incidents be treated the same? Seems like a simple question, but the answer can have big implications. Think about an employee who contacts the service desk, complaining they can’t log onto their email. If the issue is due to a ‘stale’ password, dropped connection or configuration issue after an update for the email server, then the impact on the organization can be quantified to the lost productivity for the impacted employee or employees.
Starting today, Honeycomb Metrics is now generally available to all Enterprise customers. You’ve adopted our event-based observability practices, in part to overcome the debugging roadblocks you hit when using custom metrics to identify application issues. But metrics do still provide value at the systems level. Now, you can easily see and use your metrics data alongside your event data in Honeycomb—all in one interface.
Open Telemetry represents an effort to combine distributed tracing, metrics and logging into a single set of system components and language-specific libraries. Recently, OpenTelemetry became a CNCF incubating project, but it already enjoys quite a significant community and vendor support. OpenTelemetry defines itself as “an observability framework for cloud-native software”, although it should be able to cover more than what we know as “cloud-native software”.
Cyberthreats including malware, viruses, and other security hazards are constantly evolving and becoming more dangerous and harder to detect. This makes it quite difficult to keep your data and information protected nowadays. Unless you are sure that you are absolutely protected, which is wishful thinking, you remain at risk of attacks by the latest strains of malware and security threats.
GigaOm’s latest Radar for AIOps solutions has just been released and it makes for compelling reading for anyone trying to maximize organizational performance in our digital world. Particularly if you’re down with DevOps.
