Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Automation and it’s use of the term Runbooks can be confusing and difficult to understand, especially when first starting out. We’ve put together some frequently asked questions and answers to help beginners get started.

In some respects, security and reliability are competing priorities. Security controls may reduce reliability, and responding to security incidents may require mission-critical systems to be paused or shut down until they're secure. The recent security incident involving CircleCI, however, shows that it's not always necessary to choose between prioritizing security or reliability.

In this blog, I explain the idea behind Distroless container images, which inspired us to create chiselled Ubuntu images — adding the “distro” back to distro-less! In a follow-up blog, I will then provide a step-by-step example of how you can create your own chiselled Ubuntu base container images, built for your specific needs.

VictoriaMetrics is proud to announce that we consider vmbackup and vmbackupmanager to be feature-complete solutions as of release 1.85.3. These backup components are essential for ensuring the safety and integrity of your data, and we have made a number of improvements in recent releases to make them even more reliable and user-friendly.

When IT teams and departments aren’t on the same page, they unintentionally create blockers and other issues that negatively affect the entire organization. To prevent these troublesome issues from occurring, CIO recommends looking into a few ways to make IT operations more efficient, such as automating processes or adopting a new IT approach.

The team are excited to start the new year with the latest release for Longhorn 1.4. This latest version is packed with new features and enhancements designed to help make cloud native enterprise storage simpler and more accessible to the cloud native community. For existing users of Longhorn, this latest release is focused on helping you build better value and resiliency across your storage strategy.

A look at what Apache Arrow is, how it works, and some of the companies using it as a critical component in their architecture. Over the past few decades, leveraging big datasets required businesses to perform increasingly complex analysis. Advancements in query performance, analytics, and data storage are largely a result of greater access to memory. Demand, manufacturing process improvements, and technological advances all contributed to cheaper memory.

FinOps, or the practice of managing a company’s cloud computing costs, and DevOps, the process of efficiently building applications in the cloud, should ideally go hand-in-hand. Engineers with a streamlined development process and a cost-conscious mindset can produce functional products with great margins and a high potential for scalability. However, incorporating FinOps into the DevOps lifecycle, and vice versa, isn’t always easy.

Have you ever had to set up and/or maintain a local development environment using Docker that mirrors your production environment as much as possible? Setting-up and supporting such a docker-based local environment is no easy feat! Common problems include: performance issues, broken dependencies, broken relationships between your services and uncontrolled updates of your docker images, among many other issues. So, the question is, what can we do about that?

A little over a year ago, we released Grafana Machine Learning, enabling Grafana Cloud Pro and Advanced users to easily view forecasts of their time series. We recently enhanced Grafana Machine Learning with Outlier Detection, which allows you to monitor a group of similar things, such as load-balanced pods in Kubernetes, and get alerted when something starts behaving differently than its peers.