I have been a Grafana power user since almost the day it was conceived. During this time, I’ve gotten acquainted with a few quirks but also many features, some of which are rather obscure. One of these features that few know about but I absolutely love is annotations.
At its core, Sentry is a tool that alerts you to defects in your production software. But it does more than blast stack traces into your inbox: Sentry provides powerful workflows to help your team determine root cause, triage issues to your team, and keep tabs on ongoing concerns with comments and notifications. These collaborative features can help you resolve problems with your software quickly.
In today’s post, we’ll look at system tests in Rails 6. System tests are meant to auto-test the way users interact with your application, including the Javascript in your user interface. Minitest, being the default testing framework in Rails, is a great match for system testing. With all the configuration that Rails handles for us, there are just a few steps needed before we have our first tests up and running.
From monolithic architecture to distributed systems and microservices, the art of application development has changed over the years, and the needs for monitoring those applications have evolved with it. Application performance monitoring (APM) solutions now meet the monitoring needs of all applications deployed across various platforms, be it on-premise, cloud, or even hybrid models.
Hashicorp Vault is a tool for managing secrets—sensitive data such as passwords, certificates, and API keys. Vault allows you to encrypt your secrets, control access to them, and audit activity to see who has requested data from your Vault. Datadog already monitors the status of your Vault servers—for example, you can configure the Vault integration to automatically notify you if a Vault server is unexpectedly sealed, or if there is a leader change in your Vault cluster.
As your on-premise network infrastructure grows in size and complexity, monitoring thousands of devices becomes a challenge. Whether you’re monitoring firewalls in a branch office or the routing and switching fabric in your datacenter over which all customer transactions are performed, visibility into all points of your infrastructure is critical for network maintenance.
Logs. You have them. You need to keep track of them. The process of log monitoring can be tedious. Typically it’s one of those things we take for granted and only look at when it stops working. So, how do you deal with them? In this post, we’re going to talk about why and how to monitor logs. Toward the end, we’ll discuss a few tools that’ll help, mostly to avoid manual labor.
Martha Heller is CEO of Heller Search Associates, an IT leadership executive recruiting firm. Martha is a frequent keynote speaker at IT industry events and author of two books: The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership, and Be the Business: CIOs in the New Era of IT. We chat with Martha about how CIOs are pushing tech work into the business, the IT skills they need most, and what they need to do to attract and retain women.
Microservices constantly change in containerized environs, making pod or node identification and their logging more of a challenge. Autodiscover simplifies monitoring movements in these sorts of environments—places like Kubernetes and Docker. Autodiscover allows you to track pods and adapt settings as changes happen in your environment.
The race is on to turn data into useful information. Company executives across a wide range of departments are increasingly tasked with modernization and digital transformation initiatives. But what is digital transformation in IT? IT pros are racing to keep up with rapid industry changes and must consider efforts such as digitizing assets, restructuring department goals to focus on providing a seamless customer experience, or shifting from on-premises to public cloud.
