Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When you’re operating a web application, the last thing you want to hear is “the site is down." Regardless of the reason, the fact that it is down is enough to cause anyone responsible for an app to break out into a sweat. As soon as you become aware of an issue, a clock starts ticking — literally, in some cases — to get the issue fixed. Minimizing this time between an issue occurring and its resolution is arguably the number one goal for any operations team.

It's all changing! So, business as usual! Working flexibly from home quarantine these past two years has brought a few things into sharper focus. For a start, there's really no such thing as an IT system---there are only Human-IT systems. IT isn't an accessory, it's an integral part of us. Multiple tech cultures are playing a larger role in decision making. Technology decisions are becoming more distributed and more market-driven, from the bottom up rather than exclusively from the top down.

Software performance issues come in all shapes and sizes. Therefore, performance tuning includes many aspects and subareas, and has to adopt a broad range of methodologies and techniques. Despite all this, time is one of the most critical measurements of software performance. In this multi-part series, I’ll focus on a few of the time-related aspects of software performance — particularly for security software.

You might have noticed some visual changes happening in Honeycomb lately. Colors, typography, icons, and some features have started to look a bit different. While these changes are just beginning to make their way into the product, we’ve been working on them for some time. Let’s look at what has been going on behind the scenes to make them happen.

Finally, the days are getting longer, the sun is heating up, and I’m able to spend all my free time outside soaking it in here in Austin, Texas. As I was laying out this weekend, I came up with a riddle for you: what do sunscreen, a life vest, and SolarWinds® Pingdom® have in common? Whether it’s real or metaphorical crickets I’m hearing, here’s the answer: proactivity.

Josh Chessman, Senior Analyst at Gartner, spoke at SquaredUp Live 2021 on the future of IT operations (IT Ops) monitoring and how monitoring teams need to change to get there. Here are some of the highlights from his talk.

The team at observIQ is just like every one of you reading this, we are avid programmers, gamers, traders, thinkers, and innovators who build an elaborate home network for fun, work, and for the simple reason that we enjoy technology. We are constantly growing the size and footprint of our home networks and labs as well – adding custom apps, devices, and servers, making it challenging to gauge our technical footprint.

The Prometheus Blackbox exporter allows endpoints exploration over several protocols, such as HTTP(S), DNS, TCP, and ICMP. This exporter generates multiple metrics on your configured targets, like general endpoint status, response time, redirect information, or certificate expiration dates. The Blackbox Exporter works out-of-the-box, as it just focuses on external visibility details. To get more detailed metrics, you can instrument your applications.

DataDog is a service that monitors cloud-scale applications. It is a platform used by developers of various information technology (IT) and DevOps teams. Through this service, they can define and regulate performance metrics. It was first developed in 2010 in New York by Oliver Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc, the current CEO and CTO, respectively.

H-E-B is one of the largest grocery chains in the U.S. that works with roughly 137,000 partners to achieve more than $32 billion in sales each year. In the past decade, the 116-year-old, Texas-based grocer has undergone a digital transformation to reinvent and expand its business, offering services such as online bakery orders, curbside pick-up, and grocery delivery from its 420 stores.