Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Beware These 5 Possible Dangers Lurking in Free Website Monitoring Tools

We’ve been told by the poets that the best things in life are free: A sunrise in spring, the scent of a flower, the coo of a baby, having a buddy who can get his hands on football tickets. It’s all so beautiful and uplifting (especially the football tickets). But at the same time, the economists remind us that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. And of course, we know from experience that this is often the case.

A Lesson for Every Startup from Bitcoin's 2017 Outage

In December 2017, significant declines were recorded on the exchange rate of the world’s most popular digital currency—Bitcoin. Investors who wanted to sell their currencies quickly, for fear of further declines, turned to the biggest cryptocurrency stock exchange, known as Coinbase. At Coinbase, they did not seem stressed. Their service was unavailable for several hours, and investors switched to selling their Bitcoins on other exchanges.

New feature: API monitoring with Custom Metrics

Imagine that your API response includes data that you would like to track and get regular reports on, and you may even want to generate alerts when values hit certain thresholds. You’re already monitoring for API performance and function, but how about grabbing the other data at the same time. Wouldn’t it be nice to capture the data, evaluate it, and store it in your Uptrends account? You can with Uptrends’ newest Multi-Step API feature, Custom Metrics.

Five worthy reads: Why AI-as-a-Service, or AIaaS, is quickly growing in popularity

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. Most companies use some type of “as-a-service” solution to optimize output, and this week, we shed some light on the latest “as-a-service” trend to hit the market, AI-as-a-Service.

10 killer keystrokes that'll help you work faster

I remember it like it was yesterday, but it was 20 years ago. As I approached my boss’s desk, I saw her do something amazing: she made a smaller window appear on top of her screen, displaying the icons of her open applications. She quickly toggled and selected another. In an instant, she’d gone from Outlook to Excel. No mousing around, no hunting to open the app. I squawked. What the heck was that? That, my friends, was my alt-tab Eureka! moment.

GitKraken vs Tower

The increasing popularity of Git in the software industry has led to the introduction of numerous tools designed to make the version control experience faster and more intuitive. The most notable tool for enhancing a developer’s Git workflow is a graphical user interface (GUI). Most Git GUIs on the market today offer a variety of features for simplifying Git commands into quick actions; many also have a heavy focus on making collaboration easier.

7 Important Service Desk Metrics to Measure

Service desk or IT teams are critical to organisations for ensuring business continuity and service delivery. Hence, it becomes important for IT organizations to use a slew of metrics to measure how efficient their service desk is. With the recent advancement in IT Service Management (ITSM), the reporting capabilities offer multiple KPI metrics that can be measured and monitored. So, with the increase in service desk metrics, it becomes even more difficult to zero down on which metrics to measure.

Virtualized Database Performance Tuning

Virtualized database instances are becoming more and more common, but many DBAs try to avoid virtualized databases because of the added complexity they can bring to performance resolution. With the VMware option, SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) provides detailed information related to whether the culprit affecting database performance is located in the virtualization layer or inside the database itself.