Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The other day a long-time customer wrote in with a problem. They use Honeybadger to monitor their Ruby apps for exceptions but were having trouble catching timeouts. If their app took too long to respond, their application server, Puma, would abort the request. The only insight their team had into this problem was through Puma's logs. Most people consider timeouts to be a kind of error, so it'd be nice to have them reported by Honeybadger like any other errors.

We can sift through oceans of data. Alert on predetermined parameters. Deliver multiple commits a day. But as organizations leverage these layered, complex monitoring systems, “we also have to start practicing observability to enrich the actions that we take to solve problems as they occur and drive continual improvement,” said VictorOps Product Marketing Manager Melanie Postma. VictorOps is one tool that can help accomplish that.

A recent analysis by Skyhigh Networks on 27 million employees rated Microsoft Office 365 as the most widely popular enterprise cloud service by user count. While Office 365 offers a wide range of Microsoft products on a subscription basis, from the cloud, one of its popular offerings is SharePoint Online. A recent Hyperfish, Sharegate, Nintex and LiveTiles survey estimates that adoption of SharePoint Online grew to 50% in the last year.

With AWS Lambda, you have basic observability built into the platform with CloudWatch. CloudWatch offers support for both metrics and logging. CloudWatch Metrics gives you basic metrics, visualization and alerting while CloudWatch Logs captures everything that is written to stdout and stderr. In this post, we will take a deep dive into CloudWatch Metrics to see how you can use it to monitor your Lambda functions and its limitations.

How many server types are out there? The answer to this question, like so many others, is: “It depends”. Since there can be as many types of server as a company needs, and companies have more IT needs every day, so… If we go to the definition of server we find that this is a computer that provides service to other computers that are part of a network.

(Field notes from O’Reilly’s Velocity 2019 Show, San Jose.) It was steamy hot in San Jose during O’Reilly’s Velocity show and the normally frigid AC temps in the expo hall were welcomed by all attendees, escaping the 104 degree temps. It got so bad, Charity Majors labeled it Satan Jose and the nearby Marriott hotel experienced a power outage for almost two full days, leaving guests hot under more than just their collars.

One of my earliest jobs was as an admin for an MSP. We'd routinely generate alerts that weren't actionable, lacked context, and for most of our customers, were considered noise. From a monitoring perspective, it was bad. Customers didn't trust in the alerts they received and often resorted to having some additional monitoring product installed on their systems. It's safe to say that our auto-generated tickets and emails were largely ignored.

There is a lot of talk about graphing all the things, but have you ever considered graphing all the people – in particular their on calls – as well? “Not letting people burnout on call is something that is being talked about in the industry,” said Jordan J. Hamel, Design Engineer at the biotech company Amgen.

This post will describe how to manually build a Ubuntu 18.04 Virtual Machine (VM) server using Oracle’s VirtualBox virtualisation software. Being able to build simple, expendable VMs is extremely useful, whether you’re writing software, building websites or just wanting to learn about Linux servers. We need to be able to SSH onto the server from our host machine to make access easier. To gain SSH access we therefore need to forward SSH’s port to our host.

We currently have six major cloud platforms offering serverless products, AWS Lambda being the pioneer. Our goal is to provide a quick way to compare and evaluate all. For each service, we will be evaluating: There are smaller service providers on the market that are focused on serverless, but we won’t cover them in the present analysis. For the pricing comparison, we considered regions in the United States east coast. Let the battle begin!