Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I recently had a minor task involving changing an option - on one of our command line tools - from taking a required argument, to taking an optional argument. This should be easy they said; just change the respective option struct to take an optional argument, add a colon to the optstring, and get on with your life. Well, it proved to be easier said than done. My initial expectation was that a solution similar to the one below should just work. And it does work, just not in the way I expected.

The Four Golden Signals of monitoring and observability get a lot of things right. But they could be even better.

“Observability,” is the process in DataOps of recording data generated by digital systems as they go about their processes. There are some great companies in the observability space, generating a whopping $17 billion annually, and contributing a significant portion to the modest 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every year.

Keeping the experience of your end user in mind is important when developing applications. Observability tools help your team measure important performance indicators that are important to your users, like uptime. It’s generally a good practice to measure your service internally via metrics and logs which can give you indications of uptime, but an external signal is very useful as well, wherever feasible.

Microservices are an accelerating trend thanks to rousing endorsements from the likes of Google, Netflix, and Amazon. The microservice architecture is advantageous for it’s scalability, agility and flexibility. In contrast, the monolithic approach is the traditional tried-and-true model for building software. It’s much easier to debug and test. But how do you know which approach is best for your organization?

On this day in 1889, William Gray patented the first coin operated telephone with the first model installed at the Hartford Bank in Connecticut.

Recently, my colleagues Pete Di Stefano, Ashley Adams, and I hosted a webcast on the topic of capacity planning and optimization. You can listen/watch it here, it was a really fun conversation. As part of the discussion, we talked about the need to measure the right things to get the correct outcome. Keep in mind my oft-repeated mantra: monitoring is simply the collection of data. You need a robust, mature tool to add context, which transforms those metrics into information.

When the Citrix architecture moved from v6 to v7, one of the main components that was introduced in the v7 architecture was the Citrix Delivery Controller (CDC). A Citrix Delivery Controller is a server-side component that is responsible for managing user access and brokering (enabling application and desktop access) and optimizing connections. Each site will have one or more delivery controllers.

No job is easy, but the job of a nurse is even more challenging, especially during a global health crisis. Nurses are at a higher risk of developing burnout due to the psychological trauma and cognitive overload that comes with the nursing profession. The situation is further exacerbated when nurses take on more responsibility during a pandemic or other large-scale incidents.

Open Source Robotics Challenges is a series of blogs that will share guidelines and advice for open source companies to overcome market barriers. We will touch on topics regularly raised by companies in our open source community such as security awareness, prototyping strategies, safety architecture, adoption and more.