Logging is an important part of understanding the behavior of your applications. Your logs contain essential records of application operations including database queries, server requests, and errors. With proper logging, you always have comprehensive, context-rich insights into application usage and performance. In this post, we’ll walk through logging options for Rails applications and look at some best practices for creating informative logs.

In a previous post, we walked through how you can configure logging for Rails applications, create custom logs, and use Lograge to convert the standard Rails log output into a more digestible JSON format. In this post, we will show how you can forward these application logs to Datadog and keep track of application behavior with faceted log search and analytics, custom processing pipelines, and log-based alerting.

Accountability is an important part of the work IT professionals do, especially when it comes to security and outages. A minor change by a single tech or engineer can crash entire systems, and it’s sometimes crucial to question that person on their methods and changes to determine a solution. Accountability is especially important when several people are regularly using the same tool.

In their excellent SLO-workshop at SRECon2018 (program) Liz Fong-Jones, Kristina Bennett and Stephen Thorne (Google) presented some best practice examples for Latency SLI/SLOs. At Circonus we care deeply about measuring latency and SRE techniques such as SLI/SLOs. For example, we recently produced A Guide to Service Level Objectives.

Application Performance Management (APM) tools are hot right now - so much so that it won't be long before APM reaches the same level of notoriety as the cloud, the IoT, and a personal favourite - big data.

Here’s the next installment in our Mattermost Recipes series. The goal of these posts is to provide you with solutions to specific problems, as well as a discussion about the details of the solution and some tips about how to customize it to suit your needs perfectly.

One of the most radical trends in enterprise IT in the recent years is cloud migration. With cloud service providers innovating constantly to address the security and management concerns around cloud adoption, enterprises seem more positive and reassured to migrate their on-premises workloads to the cloud.

Today we are releasing Grafana 5.2.3 and Grafana 4.6.4. These patch releases includes a very important security fix for all Grafana installations which are configured to use LDAP or OAuth authentication.

In some performance critical situations, it makes sense to limit management software to a single CPU (core). We can do this using systemd and cgroups. CFEngine already provides systemd units on relevant platforms, we just need to tweak them. I’m using CFEngine Enterprise 3.12 on CentOS 7, but the steps should be very similar on other platforms/versions.

Moving to a Docker-based cloud for Java apps orchestrated by Mesos Marathon required a different approach to monitoring and security for Quby, the Amsterdam-based developer of smart home solutions and maker of smart thermostat and service platform ‘Toon.’ That’s when they found Sysdig. The Sysdig Cloud-Native Intelligence Platform helps Quby resolve issues faster, and reduces monitoring system administration effort by 400%.