Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A Rubyist's Introduction to Character Encoding, Unicode and UTF-8

Have you ever dealt with a unicode bug? Where plain text — the substance you work with all day — can no longer be trusted? It can be disorienting to say the least! This article will help prepare you so that the next time that happens you’ll be able to spend less time hyperventilating and more time troubleshooting.

How Grafana Enterprise Helped 84.51° Centralize Its Metrics and Tell a Holistic Story

84.51°, the data analytics and marketing company owned by The Kroger Company, found out it needed centralized metrics the hard way. When Erin O’Brien was brought into the company in the spring of 2019 as a Lead Service Manager, she was tasked with evaluating and seeking ways to continuously improve how the Technology and Product teams worked together.

Okta: Atlassian product suite most popular app of the year

Atlassian and Opsgenie are among the most popular apps in the Okta network this year, according to a new report from the security company. From the report: Okta’s Business @ Work 2020 Report takes an in-depth look at how organizations and people work, exploring industries and customers, and the applications and services they use to harness productivity.

Using Auditbeat to protect your critical infrastructure

Beats are lightweight, purpose-built agents that acquire data and then feed it to Elasticsearch. Beats use the libbeat framework that makes it easy to create customized beats for any type of data you’d like to send to Elasticsearch. Auditbeat is a lightweight shipper from the Beats family that you can install on your servers to audit the activities of users and processes on your systems.

Rancher vs. OpenShift - A Consultant's View

In any rapidly emerging market, consultants can be a great source for vendor-neutral insights, as they typically work with multiple technologies to help their customers make informed decisions. In that vein, Derya (Dorian) Sezen of kloia, a new-era consulting organization that provides services toward transition of legacy workloads to frontline technologies in Cloud, DevOps and Microservices, recently wrote a blog summarizing his experience with Rancher and Red Hat OpenShift.

Accelerate DevOps workflows with the Mattermost Jira integration

Jira is one of the most popular platforms to plan software development work and to track work. Teams use Jira to create user stories, create and assign tickets, document and track issues and bug fixes, and track the entire development cycle from conception to release. Jira is incredibly useful, but it can also create a lot of email notifications whenever stories or tickets are added, changed, reassigned, or resolved.

Serverless Cost Optimization: Kinesis Streams vs Firehose

Serverless development opens lots of new opportunities, and if you’re invested in serverless (or you’ve been following the hype) you’ll know that cost efficiency is principal among those benefits. Simply put, we can save money by choosing the right tool for the right task. Since a distributed microservices architecture is made up of many managed services it’s a simple task to change out the building blocks of a particular application flow.

Getting AWS logs from S3 using Filebeat and the Elastic Stack

Logs from a variety of different AWS services can be stored in S3 buckets, like S3 server access logs, ELB access logs, CloudWatch logs, and VPC flow logs. S3 server access logs, for example, provide detailed records for the requests that are made to a bucket. This is very useful information, but unfortunately, AWS creates multiple .txt files for multiple operations, making it difficult to see exactly what operations are recorded in the log files without opening every single .txt file separately.

Using the Elastic APM Java Agent on Kubernetes

Elasticsearch and the rest of the Elastic Stack are commonly used for log and metric aggregation in various environments, including Kubernetes. In addition, the Elastic Stack is frequently being used for uptime tracking, with Heartbeat, as well as Application Performance Monitoring (APM), with agents supporting common programming languages, including Java.

Top 10 predictions for AI in IT operations

This article originally appeared in TechBeacon. Gartner first coined the term "AIOps" a few years ago to describe "artificial intelligence for IT operations," and over the last few years, IT operations monitoring tool vendors have begun incorporating AIOps features into their products. Now AIOps tools are commonplace, but many IT leaders remain cautious about using these relatively new capabilities.