Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Though you might use custom-made apps for many reasons, there’s only one reason you deploy them: off-the-shelf solutions just can’t get the job done. Whenever operations are too complex for a commercial application already in place or whenever a new kind of digital business is launched, a custom app is necessary. This is true no matter what the business model is.

Topology is a multilayered map showing how everything in the IT environment is related. It's similar to Google Maps, which gives you a bird's eye view into an area and how everything is interconnected. Also, in Google Maps, you can see how traffic is flowing and which intersections may be causing bottlenecks. A view into topology allows similar visibility. You can see how components of an IT system are laid out to interact with each other.

By 2022, Gartner estimates that more than 3 out of 4 global organizations will be running containerized applications in production. With this comes a new set of monitoring challenges — ephemeral, short-lived infrastructure, complex service interdependencies and on-call developers who now need access to data for fast troubleshooting, just to name a few.

Fastly is an edge cloud platform that includes a content delivery network (CDN), as well as services for image optimization, video streaming, cloud security, and load balancing. These services are supported by a network of caches in different locations, which enables enterprise-scale companies to deliver applications to users as quickly as possible, even in times of peak traffic.

Core Web Vitals are a new set of performance metrics that will become part of Google’s ranking algorithm from May 2021. In this blog, we explain how to measure Core Web Vitals scores. There are many ways website owners can find out their Core Web Vitals scores. This includes: PageSpeed Insights, Search Console, Lighthouse, Chrome DevTools, Chrome UX Report, and the Web Vitals Extension.

No one can deny the importance of a proper monitoring system for the effective management of IT infrastructure. You need the most efficient solutions and monitoring tools to optimize performance, make the most out of your resources, and be able to deal with errors and failure conditions. While the traditional way of IT monitoring involves the use of reports, it does have certain limitations.

We’ve been experimenting with new ways to use and operate Prometheus over the past year. Every successful Grafana Agent experiment turns into an upstream contribution for the whole Prometheus community to benefit from. In this blog post, I go over the history of the Agent’s successful — and not so successful — experiments.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, military IT leaders raced to expand network capacity and upgrade infrastructure to ensure it could meet their mission-critical workloads and support telework. Their successful efforts have established a proof of their own abilities to adapt and scale their networks with speed and agility. As more DoD personnel telework and government and home networks are pushed to the max, here are three things they must consider as plans for the impact on IT systems.

One of the most common concerns when moving to the cloud is cost. Given that cloud allows you to turn IT costs from CAPEX (long-term investments ex. in hardware equipment and software licenses) into OPEX (day-to-day operating expenses), it’s crucial to choose the right service and estimate it properly. In this article, we’ll look at the common pitfalls and discuss how you can avoid them to truly benefit from the cloud’s elasticity.