Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Monitoring an application’s performance is the basics of building a successful software product. With the popularity that Rails has always been riding on in the start-up world, it makes all the more sense to look for tools that help you keep your Ruby on Rails application in shape. In this guide, we will look at some of the top APM tools for Rails applications and compare them along some standard benchmarks to help you get an insight into which tool fits your use case the best.

Take a look at the two versions of the website below. Can you can spot the one that has a website performance mistake that would result in a £2.5 million loss in sales each year? It’s impossible to tell from the screenshots above because they appear identical.

A good deal of sites redirect visitors to a specific more relevant page. Think, for instance, of a site that redirects you from / to a page in a relevant language, for instance /en or /nl. A single redirect is often not a problem, but having multiple redirects in a chain can hinder your site's user experience. Modern browsers also limit the number of redirects.

If you were one of billions of frustrated users of Facebook who weren’t able to access their accounts Monday, rest assured in knowing that downtime is a thing of the distant past and the mega-social media platform is back online. End users can now relax knowing that the brush fire has been extinguished. Remarkably, the nearly seven-hour outage could not be attributed to the deluge of recent high-profile attacks on government, enterprise, and educational servers throughout the world.

A site reliability engineer, or SRE, is a role that that encompasses aspects of both software engineering and operations/infrastructure. It also encompasses a strategy and set of practices and principles across service offerings and is closely tied to DevOps and operations. The term site reliability engineering first came into existence at Google in 2003 when a site reliability team was created. At that time, the team was made up of software engineers.

From the basic to advanced concepts of AWS own service for identity and access management: users, groups, permissions for resources and much more. For seriously working with AWS, there’s no way around its Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. Skipping to understand its core principles will bite you again and again in the future️. Take the time to do a deep dive, so you won’t be frustrated later.

In the recent past, most engineering teams had a vague notion of what Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs) were—mainly things that their more business-focused colleagues talked about at length during contract negotiations. The success or failure of SLAs were tallied via magic calculations (what is “available” anyway?!) at the end of the month or quarter, and adjustments were made in the form of credits or celebrations in the break room.

Today I show you a snapshot of my daily work. It is especially interesting this time, because it’s a not-so simple problem to solve. It’s not difficult per se, but involves quite some understanding of the Icinga Web 2 framework and how it communicates with the web server. Disclaimer: What I’m going to show, is not a feature preview or anything. It’s more of a proof of concept, and it may be that forever and won’t be continued further.

There are a large number of best practices around SQL Server performance tuning – I could easily write a whole book on the topic, especially when you consider the number of different database settings, SQL Server settings, coding practices, SQL wait types, and so on that can affect performance.