Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

StatusGator monitors 411 different status pages, amassing a mountain of data about each. From when they are down and for how long, to what they post, to which pages people monitor the most and everything in between. Using that data, we are proud to present the first of an annual reflection on the past year. The First Annual StatusGator Status Page Awards seeks to applaud (and perhaps gently shame) a number of cloud services that stood out to us among our massive trove of status page data.

IT management has become a department that exists in every business ecosystem, irrespective of verticals. Those who are responsible for taking care of IT management need to work around the clock to secure and maintain servers, computers, smartphones, tablets, iPads, IoT devices, virtual machines, and more. The technician alone is like a modern puppeteer controlling and manipulating all these devices from one, central location in a unified way.

One of the unintended side-effects of the public cloud is the enablement of a platform-agnostic cloud architecture. This means that it’s now easier than ever to mix offerings from multiple vendors (cloud vendors in this case) to form a single application or service-based solution. There is one gotcha, however: log management.

Today’s applications are marvels of distributed systems development. Each function or service that makes up an application may be executing on a different system, based upon a different system architecture, that is housed in a different geographical location, and written in a different computer language.

Entity extraction is the process of figuring out which fields a query should target, as opposed to always hitting all fields. For example: how to tell, when the user typed in Apple iPhone, that the intent was to run company:Apple AND product:iPhone?

In July 2018, privacy-conscious organizations found out that Hipchat would be decommissioned in 2019. Since many of these companies operate in highly regulated environments, they are unable to use popular SaaS messaging products that host sensitive data on third-party servers. With Hipchat rapidly reaching its end-of-life, these organizations are looking for a secure and modern messaging platform that can be hosted on-premises in their own data centers, behind a firewall.

We are very excited to announce Calico v3.6. Here are some highlights from the release.

With AWS Lambda, deploying a new version of our application has never been simpler. However, we still need to take care of some underlying plumbing. Such as managing the configuration for our functions as well as other related resources such as API Gateway, CloudWatch log groups and IAM policies. Depending on the event sources you would like to use, you also need to provision the necessary EventSourceMapping in order to use Lambda with the likes of Kinesis Streams and SQS.

When we announced the launch of our Postmortem Guide, I wrote about the value of performing blameless postmortems and how to establish a culture of continuous learning. In this final installment of our blog series on postmortems, I share how to have effective postmortem meetings.