Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

It's hard to imagine a world without APIs. APIs connect our mobile phones or computers to do everything from making purchases and payments to interacting on social media, extracting or sharing data or any other computer to computer interaction in our business or daily life. If you want to open up a heated debate, ask one of your programming partners or developer colleagues what makes up a good API response time?

IT pros in the healthcare industry have one of the toughest jobs imaginable. Herculean task number one is protecting patient data, with failure to do so bringing hefty HIPAA fines and more than a little bad press. Gargantuan task number two is stopping breaches (and then doing forensics if one busts through). Failing either of these is not exactly a confidence booster. Don’t forget, almost all hacks and breaches either attack the network itself or go across it to reach their target.

As a typical Internet user, nothing is more frustrating than waiting for a web page to display, only to receive a “Page Not Found” 404 error status code. Sure, we try reloading the page, and sometimes that gets the gremlins to start working, but most times, the issue is out of our hands. For all of us typical users, we either go onto the next thing or find a different site. There’s a lot going on in the background that most of us are completely unaware of.

Before we jump into this, it’s important to note that older names, and still in use in some areas of AWS, are often referred to SSM which stands for Simple Systems Manager. AWS Systems Manager is designed to be a control panel for your AWS resources so you can manage them externally without having to SSH into the resources individually. What is important to remember with AWS Systems Manager is that features contained within the tool may occur additional pricing.

Almost since the moment the world shut down at the start of the pandemic, we’ve heard what a blessing remote and hybrid work is for environmental sustainability. With fewer of us driving and flying for work, it can feel like hybrid work is the sustainable solution we’ve dreamed of for so long. Yet at the same time, attention is also being cast on big tech companies like Facebook and Google for their role in producing (and curbing) e-Waste.

Websites are the economic engine for modern businesses and service providers. A user-friendly, always-on, secure site reassures visitors and shows customers, business partners and others you are serious about your business. As CTO, DevOps manager, or IT lead, you need a digital experience monitoring (DEM) strategy to prevent or minimize website or API downtime.

Imagine a workflow where you change and test all of your configurations in the “development” environment, committing those changes along the way, and then when you’re happy with the changes, you bundle them together in a single “pull request”, and the changes, after being reviewed by your peer(s), get pushed into production.