Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Over the past few months, I’ve written a couple of blogs analyzing significant Azure outages that affected multiple services. These articles covered detecting cloud outages long before Microsoft confirmed them and provided details of symptoms we saw. You can read these articles about a September 2022 outage and another in January 2023.

As modern work has evolved, so too has the network end users rely on to do their jobs. Today’s network is vastly different from the networks of just a few years ago, with the new last mile of the office network evolving to cover anywhere end users are. This has had a significant impact on the visibility IT professionals have in the office network, and it means we need to revisit what network visibility really means as modern work continues to evolve.

When a tech community comes together, great things happen and Serverless Days ANZ 2023 was no exception. As soon as you checked-in, you could feel the community spirit, buzz and excitement that comes with an event like this. It’s been four years since the last Serverless Days ANZ was able to run IRL (In real life), and the local serverless community had been eagerly waiting for its return.

As Gaurav described in his retail predictions blog, the impact of AI and automation on the retail industry should not be underestimated. The compound effects of improvements in technology and labour shortages have created an ideal scenario for innovation. Here we will take a deeper look into some of the AI and automation use cases that we have seen in retail and outline some of the areas of focus to help you get started.

Synthetic monitoring is a means to monitor applications, pages, APIs, etc., from the user’s perspective so you can best understand how they perform for actual users. IT professionals use synthetic monitoring to run simple uptime checks and to monitor complex, mission-critical business transactions. Synthetic monitoring tools also allow you to test and monitor third-party applications, which can impact how your users experience your websites and web applications.

For most enterprise NetOps teams, a discussion about the WAN is a discussion about the cloud. Whether it’s as simple as ensuring solid connectivity with a SaaS provider or designing a robust, secure, hybrid, and multi-cloud architecture, the enterprise wide area network is all about connecting us to our resources, wherever they are.

Implementing SLAs, SLIs, and SLOs is essential for effective monitoring and maintaining optimal system performance. As companies grow, they may add a significant number of KPIs that burden their IT assets, leading to system sluggishness and employee complaints. Developers must balance business needs with IT processes, and SLAs, SLIs, and SLOs can help them achieve this balance.

Today’s enterprises must have the capability to cope with the growing volumes of observability data, including metrics, logs, and traces. This data is a critical asset for IT operations, site reliability engineers (SREs), and security teams that are responsible for maintaining the performance and protection of data and infrastructure. As systems become more complex, the ability to effectively manage and analyze observability data becomes increasingly important.

Elasticsearch is a popular search engine that can be used to swiftly and almost instantly store, explore, and analyze huge volumes of data. It offers a distributed, multitenant full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents on top of Apache Lucene. In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to communicate with an Elasticsearch cluster using a Python Elasticsearch client.

It’s been a minute since our last Feature Focus, and we have a bit of catching up to do! I’m happy to report we’ll resume monthly updates next month, but until then, please enjoy this super-sized winter digest of what we’ve been up to at Honeycomb.