Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Everyone in the software industry is in a race to become more agile. We all want to improve the performance of our software development lifecycle (SLDC). But how do you actually do that? If you want to improve your performance, first determine what KPI you’d like to improve. DORA metrics offer a good set of KPIs to track and improve. It started as a research by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and Google Cloud (which later acquired DORA), to understand what makes high performing teams.

When I had my first child almost six years ago, I expected that most of my time would be spent in the role of a teacher rather than a student. I have two kids now — and I’m certainly teaching them as much as I can as they grow and learn to navigate the world — but if someone were keeping score, my kids might end up on top when it comes to who’s taught who more. Another thing that surprised me is how similar building a family is to build a company from the ground up.

Cloud services were born at the beginning of 2000 with companies such as Salesforce and Amazon paving the way. Simple Queuing Service (SQS) was the first service to be launched by Amazon Web Services in November 2004. It was offered as a distributed queuing service and it is still one of the most popular services in AWS. By 2006 more and more services were added to the offering list.

For smart cities of the future, monitoring infrastructure metrics like fuel and water levels is vital to optimizing operations. Fuelics PC designs and deploys battery-operated narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) sensors that monitor fuel, water, waste, and even parking capacity at the edge, then transmit that data to the cloud for easy viewing and monitoring.

If you were pulled into a meeting right now and asked to give your thoughts on how to achieve better outcomes with monitoring and observability, what would you recommend? Would you default to suggesting that your team improve Mean Time To Detect (MTTD)? Sure, you might make some improvements in that area, but it turns out that most of the opportunities lie in what comes after your system detects an issue. Let’s examine how to measure improvements in monitoring and observability.

The best part of my job is talking with prospects and customers about their logging and data practices. I love to talk about everything they are currently doing and hope to accomplish so I can get a sense of overall goals and understand current pain points. It’s vital to come up with solutions that provide broad value across the enterprise and not just a narrow tactical win with limited impact.

Organizations in every industry are becoming increasingly dependent upon data to drive more efficient business processes and a better user experience. As the data collection and preparation processes that support these initiatives grow more complex, the likelihood of failures, performance bottlenecks, and quality issues within data workflows also increases.