Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It may surprise you to hear, but Honeycomb doesn’t currently have a platform team. We have a platform org, and my title is Director of Platform Engineering. We have engineers doing platform work. And, we even have an SRE team and a core services team. But a platform team? Nope. I’ve been thinking about what it might mean to build a platform team up from scratch—a situation some of you may also be in—and it led me to asking crucial questions. What should such a team own?

Cloud Logging launched Log Analytics powered by BigQuery. The top 10 reasons to get started with Log Analytics for no additional cost

I like to leverage our technologies to ensure our products have a pleasant user experience. Elastic Synthetics enables you to configure it in an out-of-the-box experience directly through your Elastic Cloud deployment without the need to install anything! It also works across the globe with multiple locations you can choose from. Ever wondered how fast your web service is when accessed from Japan, Germany, or the eastern U.S.? Now you can do this by simply clicking on a checkbox.

This article was originally published in The New Stack and is reposted here with permission. Working with geo-temporal data can be difficult. In addition to the challenges often associated with time-series analysis, like large volumes of data that you want real-time access to, working with latitude and longitude often involves trigonometry because you have to account for the curvature of the Earth. That’s computationally expensive. It can drive costs up and slow down programs.

The internet of things is one of my favorite topics. IOT enables low-powered connected devices that opens gateways from the digital to the real world. While I love tinkering away with an Arduino sketch and the latest Espressif or Arduino board, there is always an air of frustration when trying to build out what at first seems like simple functionality using one of these “smart devices” because of the limited view we have into their operations.

If you’re unfamiliar with observability, you might think an “observability engineer” is just a fancy way to say data admin — but while observability engineers often work with data admins, they work toward different goals. Data admins monitor information to identify and fix known security issues. Observability engineers work to provide a complete picture of all the data a company aggregates and what it means for a business.

HostedGraphite provides a complete infrastructure and application monitoring platform from a suite of open-source monitoring tools. Use Hosted Graphite and view all required metrics on beautiful dashboards in real time. Hosted Graphite offers a wide range of tools, add-ons, and plugins which make it possible to measure, analyze, and visualize large amounts of data about your applications with ease.

Not long ago, monitoring tools were just nice additions to have and did not have a lot of purposes. However, as technologies scaled up and became more complex, keeping track of all the systems and their health became a huge challenge. As more and more brands started offering new digital services and moved the existing platform, the competition skyrocketed and being on top of system health and proactively resolving potential incidents became crucial.

Netdata’s Cassandra collector documentation explains how to set it up to collect metrics automatically. Once you have followed the instructions in the docs and have installed and configured Netdata on the Cassandra cluster you are ready to start monitoring and troubleshooting.

The database market has seen a tremendous boost over the past years. Although database environments have become much more reliable and performant, there is still good reason to monitor dedicated IBM Db2 on-premise or cloud deployments. The NiCE DB2 Management Pack complements highly advanced availability and performance monitoring based on Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, freeing up valuable admin time while keeping crucial deployments safely up and running.