Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

VIPs can be hard work, but in many ways, that’s for good reason. Whether it’s your C-suite that carries the responsibility of the company on their shoulders, or if it’s your top-shelf customers that form a big part of your business, you really need to look after them all. You know that, but from an IT perspective, how can you not support them while making your life easier? You need to quit being reactive. Easier said than done… but here’s how to start making it happen.

In the previous article I covered how to set up auto-instrumented tracing for a Node.js app using OpenTelemetry (OTEL). We then sent the spans directly to the open source tracing tool Jaeger. I recommend you give that a read first before walking through this guide because we're going to re-use the instrumentation we set up last time. Today we're going to take things a step further by introducing the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Just after midnight on October 1, 2023, the remote island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic began passing internet traffic over its long-awaited, first-ever submarine cable connection. In this blog post, we cover how Kentik’s measurements captured this historic activation, as well as the epic story of the advocacy work it took to make this development possible.

Understanding production has historically been reserved for software developers and engineers. After all, those folks are the ones building, maintaining, and fixing everything they deliver into production. However, the value of software doesn't stop the moment it makes it to production. Software systems have users, and there are often teams dedicated to their support.

This article was originally published on The New Stack and is reposted here with permission. By taking advantage of monitoring data, companies can ensure their infrastructure is performing optimally while reducing costs. While building new features and launching new products is fun, none of it matters if your software isn’t reliable. One key part of making sure your apps run smoothly is having robust infrastructure monitoring in place.

When it comes to managing services effectively, terms like SLA, SLO, and SLI are often thrown around like confetti at a parade. They’re in meetings, in documents, and even in casual office conversations. But if you’re new to the field or simply haven’t had the chance to dig into these acronyms, they can feel like a bewildering alphabet soup. And they can’t be missing on an uptime monitoring blog such as ours! So, what do these terms really mean?

Icinga 2.14 introduced a new feature that allows to better model complex dependencies between your hosts and services: redundancy groups. Let’s take an e-mail server as an example. In order to deliver outgoing messages, it has to look up the addresses of the destination servers and relies on DNS for doing so. For incoming messages, it has to know which accounts exist and in a corporate environment, this typically means looking up user accounts in a directory service like LDAP.

AWS’s serverless technologies are popular because they provide cost effective scaling and great separation of concerns. However, observing serverless architectures like Lambda is challenging due to their transient nature and abstracted infrastructure. Unlike traditional systems with consistent hosts, serverless functions are ephemeral, often scaling rapidly and operating in isolation.