Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The 7 Application Performance Metrics You Need to Measure and Why

When it comes to releasing new features out into the wild, developers and managers alike need to toe the line between speed and performance. Take an all too common situation, where sales submits a high priority ticket to the development team that's a blocker for an enterprise deal coming through the pipeline.

Kibana Lens Tutorial: Easily Create Stunning Visualizations

Millions of people already use Kibana for a wide range of purposes, but it was still a challenge for the average business user to quickly learn. Visualizations often require quite a bit of experimentation and several iterations to get the results “just right” and this Kibana Lens tutorial will get you started quickly.

The Top Azure blogs we follow

As Microsoft is forever releasing new functionality within Azure and all its offerings its often hard to keep abreast of the latest changes in technology. To do so, we here at SmiKar Software often follow influential and knowledgeable people that are experts in the their fields, to keep up to date ourselves. In no particular order, here are some of the noteworthy Azure Blogs that we follow.

Monitoring CI/CD Pipelines

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) form the backbone of the product delivery lifecycle. A well tuned, fault tolerant and scalable CI/CD pipeline is very important to support modern Agile teams. Despite obvious business advantages, a rapid release approach combined with continuous change processes resulting from DevOps principles will in the long run generate new challenges. The entire process needs to be carefully examined and controlled.

Debug errors in Lambda functions

Troubleshooting production issues in Lambda environments is often challenging. CloudWatch requires developers to comb through logs, search for relevant terms that they may not always know of and has hard-to-consume stack traces. For obvious reasons, we recommend using Sentry to instrument your Lambda Functions code in order to report error stack traces and associated debugging context. Here’s a walk through on how to instrument a Node function.

Detecting Bottlenecks in Virtual Machine Performance

No matter the application or strengths of your Virtual Machine, it must rely on the resources you provide. In such a scenario, it is common to run into bottlenecks and performance issues that can undermine your operations’ productivity. Often, these bottlenecks present challenges to the team as frequent issues pose risks to the operation’s health.

Remote Support Software for MSPs

As MSPs work to support customers in 2020, they face a unique set of challenges—which is why they need dependable and robust remote support software designed specifically for their requirements. As the workforce becomes increasingly remote, it is crucial that managed service providers (MSPs) adapt their business practices to accommodate this change and properly support their customers.

3 Critical Data Points to IT Asset Tracking

As companies grow and mature, it’s easy to feel trapped in an IT asset mud pit. IT pros faced with increasing numbers of users, more complex systems, and a variety of vendor products can lose track of IT assets, let maintenance slide, and run into compatibility issues. This is especially true in the current remote work and virtual school environments. In order to simplify IT asset tracking, it’s important to monitor three critical data points.