Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Scheduling IT and Engineering on-call rotations just got easier

It shouldn’t take you more time than a few seconds to understand your on-call schedule and rotations and how you could make changes to it. It is important for on-call scheduling and alerting tools to make this as simple as possible. If you’re spending more than a few seconds to understand what your on-call rotations are going to be like for the next day or week or month, then you need to start looking for a better on-call management tool.

Bring Test Engineering into your DevOps practice

What do a test engineer and a DevOps or SRE team member have in common? The reality is that different teams need to proactively understand what is happening in production at critical milestones along the software engineering delivery cycle. In the words of Abby Bangser, senior test engineer at Moo, “Testing has so much in common with Ops and SRE teams. We need to ask interesting questions of production. We need no more debates whether a bug gets fixed.

Is it a good time(stamp) for centralized logging?

With almost all deployed software systems consisting of multiple moving parts, it’s hard to find arguments against centralized aggregation of log entries. Deployment technologies like lightweight virtualization, Kubernetes, and serverless computing tend to spread out the components of a system across a large number of runtime primitives. Gaining visibility into the state and history of such systems is as important as ever but can also be more difficult than ever.

Playing defense against Gamaredon Group

For several months, the Intelligence & Analytics team at Elastic Security has tracked an ongoing adversary campaign appearing to target Ukranian government officials. Based on our monitoring, we believe Gamaredon Group, a suspected Russia-based threat group, is behind this campaign. Our observations suggest a significant overlap between tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) included within this campaign and public reporting.

Importance of After-Hour Response Teams

Exceptional customer service is key in the world of IT, where something could go wrong at any given moment. This level of support equates to business retention, client satisfaction and high success rates and profits. In this post, I’ll introduce a hypothetical scenario, where “MSP Team A” provides 24×7 after-hours support to a valuable client.

Canary deployments for IT operations

This article originally appeared in Jaxcenter. Canary deployments are a commonly-used DevOps practice for staggered rollouts, sending small updates to groups in order to catch and fix issues. Ultimately, experimenting with DevOps practices such as canary deployments can help IT (and IT operations) bridge the gap with the business and deliver more value, faster.