Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

For years, organizations have relied on Application Performance Monitoring (APM) as the backbone of their observability strategy. The idea was simple: collect as many logs, metrics, and traces as possible, then sift through the data to uncover insights. But as applications have shifted to the cloud and become increasingly API-driven, that model has broken down.

This past weekend saw the latest round of submarine cable cuts to impact internet connectivity between Europe and Asia. And once again they took place in the Red Sea, an historic problem area for subsea cables. In this post, I review some of the impacts that we observed in both the loss of transit in affected countries as well as increased latencies between public cloud regions using Kentik’s Cloud Latency Map.

“How did we fail to monitor xyz prior to this incident?" “We should monitor everything" “Are we vetting applications prior to deployment, including security apps that may adversely affect application performance and responsiveness?”

In contrast to the many flavors of governance used for IT, such as data governance, audit and compliance, and governance and security, IT monitoring governance lacks a definition in many organizations. This is true even as teams have decades of experience monitoring the health, performance, and availability of applications, infrastructures, networks, and user experience. Good monitoring governance “just sort of happens—naturally, organically.” Not exactly!

I tried thinking back to when the last time I read an actual tutorial that did not include a bunch of em (—) dashes, semicolons, normal dashes, and an unnervingly large quantity of the phrases like “XYZ-thing Alert ” and “Exciting News!”. Well, hold on to your suspenders folks, here we go again. Part 2 is up and it’s a controversial one.

We’re rolling out Early Warning Signals to yet another place your team works every day: Discord. With this release, nearly all of our chat integrations now deliver Early Warning Signals—bringing you proactive outage alerts no matter where your team collaborates. Already available by email, SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and webhooks, Early Warning Signals are now live in Discord too—closing the gap and making sure your team is covered wherever you communicate.