Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As the world moves towards the “new normal” on account of the pandemic, numerous adjustments and recalibrations have been made in all aspects of our lives, including the organizations we are part of. As businesses base their operations on a dispersed workforce beyond the corporate perimeter, IT teams have been the ones largely enabling this successful migration to home workspaces and further sustaining the remote network to foster productivity.

You hear about APIs (application program interfaces) everywhere now, and even if you don’t know what one is, you’ve probably heard the term more than once. In this article, we cover a few API basics, and we talk a bit about why you should use API monitoring if you publish or have an API that is critical to your business.

Nishant Singh is an SRE at LinkedIn based in Bangalore. Currently, he is working towards building and maintaining applications that improve the overall MTTD (Mean time to detect) and MTTR (Mean time to recover) of the site. He likes to build services and play with the latest technologies. Before LinkedIn, Nishant worked for a few companies in the security and e-commerce domain as a DevOps engineer where he was primarily responsible for building infrastructure, deployment pipelines and security.

Our sources state that there has been a 20% increase in web-skimming attacks since the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. Recently, we have witnessed some high-profile Magecart attacks on websites which have gained popularity during the pandemic, including fitness-based websites. The latest fitness-based website attack reported is YogaFit, who were compromised for over 6 weeks.

When it comes to troubleshooting application performance, metrics are no longer enough. To fully understand the environment you need logs and traces. Today, we’re going to focus on your Java applications.

You know the feeling. You’ve just deployed a new version to production and are monitoring the Rollbar dashboard for any new errors or looking out for any Slack notifications. You’re keeping an eye on the number of new or reactivated errors, their severity level, and triaging to see which errors need to be assigned and to whom. Now what if you could automate these tasks?

When monitoring third-party applications with Prometheus, you’ll need an exporter if the application doesn’t already expose metrics in the appropriate format. How do you find an appropriate exporter, and once you have your exporters, how should you organize your label taxonomies to reflect your infrastructure? Many applications in the systems you’re in charge of will be third-party applications, which do not natively expose Prometheus-formatted metrics.

We’re very excited to announce that Ansible roles to deploy StackStorm have been promoted to new major version 2.0.0! There has been a lot of activity recently on the ansible-st2 repository, with 4 releases in the last couple of months. Ansible can now be used to deploy StackStorm on more modern operating systems and with newer third-party applications.

AWS Activate is a program that provides startups with free AWS credits. There are specific requirements startups must meet in order to qualify, and not all startups that qualify end up receiving the free AWS credits. Still, for any startup planning on running their app in AWS, it’s probably worth a try. AWS Activate has two packages: the Founders package and the Portfolio package.

PostgreSQL is an open source database known for its reliability and performance. It’s used across many industries and applications, and is especially a favorite of web developers. All major web frameworks support PostgreSQL natively, from node.js and Django to Rails and Spring, so its adaptation is relatively broad across the internet for site backend systems. As with any database, developers need tools to work with them. Pgweb is an open source, web-based client for PostgreSQL.