Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Monitoring is the most important aspect of infrastructure operations. Effective monitoring strategies help optimize infrastructure usage, improve planning, and resolve incidents quickly. While monitoring preceded DevOps, DevOps has further transformed the software development process to the extent that monitoring also has to evolve.

In this blog post we will look at filetop command. It is available in BCC tool collection. Disk IO is one of the key activities happening on the system, especially for data intensive systems running databases or serving files.

In this blog post we will look at gethostlatency command. It is available in both BCC and bpftrace tool collections. Most applications and services use hostnames, rather than IP addresses to communicate with other services. This means before connection to the service can be established, another request needs to be made – to DNS (Domain Name System). As such its performance and availability impacts performance of virtually all services in your environment, yet it is often ignored.

In this blog post we will look at runqlat and runqslower commands. They are available in both BCC and bpftrace tool collections. One of the core functions of Linux operating system is to schedule processes across available CPUs. When service gets a request, Linux typically will need to schedule the process, processing that request to run on one of CPUs. This might be very quick process if idle CPU is available or it can take significant time, if all CPUs are currently busy running different processes.

eBPF is a powerful technology used by many observability solutions, including Coroot. While web-based observability tools like Coroot are invaluable, there’s a specific class of eBPF tools that often go overlooked (besides Brendan Gregg of course): eBPF Linux Command Line Tools. These tools are essential for diving deep into complex performance issues. But first – why would you need those at all if you have convenient observability focused web applications?

Recently I've been working with an MSP on a couple of their use cases. One of the services they're designing for their customers is that of cost optimization on their IT infrastructure. On top of the in-house services and tools they had, they needed a tool to help them identify and quantify this underutilization. This is something SquaredUp is very well suited to do – and so we got to work!

Many organizations use Oracle databases for their ability to be deployed anywhere, embedded security features, robust data analysis capabilities, and scalability. But manually managing Oracle databases can be impractical, requiring constant attention to optimize performance.