OpsRamp delivers real-time observability that IT teams need to understand the performance and availability of business services. Given that modern digital services rely on dynamic and distributed infrastructure, it is critical to pinpoint performance issues that prevent an enterprise from delivering compelling user experiences. So how do you track the end-customer experience as well?

One of the common pieces of advice I hear given to managed service providers (MSPs) is to “go narrow”—find a niche and become a specialist. This is generally sound advice. Specialization typically means your MSP faces less competition and becomes much easier to find in an otherwise crowded marketplace. But finding an area to specialize in is easier said than done. So how do you find a great niche for your MSP?

At this point in our series, you’re likely quite familiar with the many opportunities and challenges that Kubernetes presents (especially when it comes to monitoring!). The last couple of posts take at a look at Prometheus for monitoring Kubernetes, with a side-by-side comparison with Sensu, and illustrate how they work in tandem.

As an Internet startup, you have to put out innovative, meaningful solutions for your users. Therefore, no matter what that solution may be, you’ve got to make sure that the solution is available, functioning, and has excellent performance at launch and afterwards. To help you succeed and to avoid common web monitoring mistakes, we’ve put together a list for you.

There are transparent companies – and then there’s GitLab. “GitLab is a ridiculously transparent company,” said Ben Kochie, a Staff Backend Engineer for Monitoring at GitLab. “When GitLab has a database outage, we live stream the recovery on YouTube.” GitLab has the same bare all approach to its metrics. “All of our Prometheus metrics are available on a public Grafana dashboard,” Kochie told the crowd gathered at GrafanaCon.

Cloudflare, a company that provides CDN services to major websites around the world, recently experienced an outage that took down many of their customers’ sites. The outage began around 7AM EST, and many major companies, including web hosting company WP Engine and chat service Discord also experienced outages due to issues over at Cloudflare. Cloudflare has identified the source of the problem and implemented a temporary fix until the issues can be resolved permanently.

API Gateway is a powerful tool for creating a coherent API out of a set of multiple disconnected remote function providers, and API Gateway with AWS Lambda, when used properly, can give you the capacity to create truly powerful serverless APIs. However, given that API Gateway is a layer between your requests and the code itself, there are latency concerns that API Gateway Lambdas may face that may not be present when working with other architectures.

Reliability and user experience are no longer just “nice to have” features. Many companies provide similar services and competition is just a click away. Those with state-of-the-art offerings will be ahead of the pack and have more resources for ongoing improvements. Certainly, speed and uptime are not for free, but the good news is that even with a small budget, reliable applications can be realized.

Ok, not completely true. I also use Stripe, Github, AWS, Heroku, Ghost, AppOptics, Intercom and Mailchimp. And some bookkeeping and tax tools. Don't forget the code editors! But! When I plan my day, I spend most of my time in Trello and Apple's stock Reminders app. I also use Numbers once a week or so. This post is turning out to be click bait. Read on, it's really not. In former jobs I went through probably every project management and productivity tool out there.