No matter your business's sector or size, you probably depend on your websites, web applications, APIs, and complete IT infrastructure to be functional, available, and provide users with a pleasant experience. However, we are aware that websites and applications cannot just be set up and left alone.

Continuous integration (CI) demands continous testing: shifting left helps prevent faulty code from spreading, which is one of the core aims of CI. Datadog’s new Azure DevOps extension enables you to seamlessly incorporate integration and end-to-end tests into existing CI/CD workflows on Azure Pipelines, a dedicated CI/CD service that automatically runs builds, performs tests, and deploys your services and applications via cloud-hosted pipelines.

Synthetic monitoring can be one of the most powerful tools in your DevOps team’s toolkit, especially for the SRE, yet is one that is often overlooked by people building out a reliability mindset. Synthetic monitoring permits you to simulate any transaction or interaction users can have in your website or app, from places around the world, as often as you’d like.

We recently announced a FREE ready-to-go standalone SaaS logon simulator tool for Microsoft AVD, available here. This joins our fully featured logon simulator available for use on-premises, as SaaS or in the cloud within our synthetic monitoring suite. A logon simulator, whilst a useful tool, should be used in conjunction with other synthetic and real user monitoring tools for a truly proactive IT strategy designed to prevent real users encountering issues and raising support tickets.

gRPC is an open-source Remote Procedure Call (RPC) framework developed by Google and released in 2016. Although gRPC is still relatively new, large organizations are adopting it in increasing numbers to build APIs that connect complex microservice meshes that use disparate languages and frameworks. gRPC-based APIs can perform requests up to seven times faster than REST APIs and enable customers to easily implement SSL authentication, load balancing, and tracing via plug-in libraries.