Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It can be difficult to track down memory leaks, especially when deploying apps on cloud-based application services. Often teams are left with restarting their apps as the only—and less than ideal—recourse to get them back up and running. So what do you do when your cloud-based app springs a memory leak, and how do you pinpoint the cause? In this article, we’ll create a Java app designed to purposely leak memory and deploy it to DigitalOcean.

Logging is tricky. You want logs to include enough detail to be useful, but not so much that you're drowning in noise - or violating regulations like GDPR. In this article, Diogo Souza introduces us to Ruby's logging system and the LogRage gem. He shows us how to create custom logs, output the logs in formats like JSON, and reduce the verbosity of default Rails logs.

For our API, we’ve been happily using NewRelic’s monolog enricher for a while, which sends our application logs to NewRelic at the end of each request, making it light and fast for our system not to be bothered by it. Until it stopped working with the upgrade to Composer 2, and they knew about it for several months and still didn’t do a single thing to fix it. So I decided to move to Logflare. Logflare is a fast, light, scalable, and powerful logging aggregator.

Microsoft Azure provides a suite of cloud computing services that allow organizations across every industry to deploy, manage, and monitor full-scale web applications. As you expand your Azure-based applications, securing the full scope of your cloud resources becomes an increasingly complex task. Azure platform logs record the who, what, when, and where of all user-performed and service account activity within your Azure environment.

Today, I’m happy to share more about our partnership and commitment to our users that they will have the best possible experience of both Elasticsearch and Grafana, across the full breadth of Elasticsearch functionality, with dedicated engineering from both Grafana Labs and Elastic. Through joint development of the official Grafana Elasticsearch plugin users can combine the benefits of Grafana’s visualization platform with the full capabilities of Elasticsearch.

Splunk is a fantastic platform for ingesting, storing, searching and analysing data from logs, metrics and traces from a massive variety of sources. But does that mean we should ignore all of that data that doesn’t fall into these categories, like image and video data for example? Of course not!

I drive a 2005 Ford diesel pickup truck. Most of the time my truck runs great. But occasionally an orange light on the dashboard will flicker on to alert me that something is wrong. Unfortunately, there’s no information about what is wrong and why. My truck has a monitoring solution, but not an observability solution. In many cases, IT has the same problem as my truck.

One of the more delicate debates in the DevOps world is what observability has to do with monitoring. Is observability just a trendy buzzword that means the same thing as monitoring? Is observability an improved version of monitoring? Are monitoring and observability different types of processes that solve different problems? The answer to those questions depends in part on your perspective.