Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I recently attended a virtual event and heard the speaker comment, “Relational databases don’t scale.” To my ears, this is about as silly a statement as saying, “No one can eat 26 hot dogs in 12 minutes” right before Kobayashi shows up and eats 50. In my experience, relational databases scale when they’re placed in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing. Just imagine if Kobayashi was your data architect!

While IT pros know they need to monitor IT services, they also know it can be the most difficult part of their job. Traditionally, enterprises have cobbled together several disparate monitoring products to address all their monitoring needs – but there are often gaps. Within these gaps, issues are missed, and the possibility of proactive issue resolution becomes nearly impossible.

According to data from W3Techs, more than 40% of all websites are built on WordPress. Therefore, it’s no surprise that WordPress hosting has skyrocketed in popularity recently and hosting providers have proliferated. With so many choices, it’s important to understand just how reliable WordPress hosts are, especially when it comes to downtime. Web hosting downtime can have significant consequences such as business loss, brand damage, and missed opportunities.

When working with log messages, it’s critical that the timestamp of the log message is accurate. Incorrect timestamps can cause problems when trying to find log messages at a specific date/time or may cause alerts to not function properly. A common cause of incorrect timestamps for log messages is a mismatch of time zones between the log source (device sending the log) and log destination (device receiving the log, such as Graylog).

Elastic Observability 8.6 introduces a set of capabilities improving production operations through the introduction of host (EC2/GCP compute/Azure compute) observability, application dependency operations views (insights into databases, caches, etc), and a new connector for Opsgenie. These new features allow customers to: Elastic Observability 8.6 is available now on Elastic Cloud — the only hosted Elasticsearch offering to include all of the new features in this latest release.

Only two days into the new year, and we had our first BGP routing leak. It was followed by a couple more in subsequent days. Although these incidents were brief with marginal operational impact on the internet, they are still worth analyzing because they shed light on the cracks in the internet’s routing system.

Without an active SSL certificate, user contact with the website is no longer secured, making it possible for any malicious entity to access private user information. Users are unlikely to return to the website after viewing a security notice, though. The simplest way to monitor the expiration of your site certificates is to use an efficient, automatic SSL certificate expiry monitoring solution.

Real User Monitoring (RUM) is a method of web performance monitoring that captures user experience metrics on visitors to your website. It is also known as real user metrics, end-user experience monitoring, or simply user monitoring. You can think of Real User Monitoring as an automated way to get user feedback on your website. Not every user will complete a survey or fill out a feedback form, but RUM listens to each one of your users.

A new year has started and I've been pondering my hopes and dreams for the year to come. In the world of SRE, observability is the most prominent pillar of my work. So, I decided to drill into the topic of observability and what I'd like to see happen in the industry in 2023. Rather than focusing on any tool, technology, or methodology, I'lll be exploring concepts that can be broadly applied in any organization.

We Just celebrated 10 year birthday to Prometheus last month. Prometheus was the second project to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation after Kubernetes in 2016, and has quickly become the de-facto way to monitor Kubernetes workloads. The plug-and-play experience, just putting Prometheus server and starting to see metrics flowing in tagged with Kubernetes labels, was a compelling offer.