Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When and Why To Adopt Feature Flags

What if there was a way to deploy a new feature into production — and not actually turn it on until you’re ready? There is! These tools are called feature flags (or feature toggles or flippers, depending on whom you ask). Feature flags are a powerful way to fine-tune your control over which features are enabled within a software deployment. Of course, feature flags aren’t the right solution in all cases.

Top Incident Response Metrics & How to Use Them

Two categories a software organization should always strive to improve in are: Data analysis is one way that your organization can improve the efficiency of incident management and overall application quality. However, the questions remain – which metrics should be collected? How can analysis of these metrics facilitate these improvements? Read on to hear about five key metrics essential to incident response.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) vs. Load Balancers: What's The Difference?

Load balancers and content delivery networks (CDNs) are critical tools for delivering modern, cloud-native applications. They play essential roles in ensuring the smooth flow of data between applications and end-users. If you don’t have both a load balancer and a CDN in place, you’re probably in a poor position to guarantee the uptime of your application across a wide geographic area. That does not mean, however, that load balancers and CDNs do the same thing.

State of DevOps 2022: Report Roundup

DevOps has never been more popular than it is today. Since first popularized nearly 15 years ago by Patrick Debois and Gene Kim, DevOps has become the standard approach for managing IT. In this blog post, we’ll look at key trends and data that paint a picture of today’s State of DevOps. You can learn more about the history and fundamentals of the topic in our article What is DevOps and why is it important?.

What Is eBPF? A Guide To Improved Observability & Telemetry

Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) is an exciting technology that provides secure, high-performance kernel programmability directly from the operating system. It can expose a wide range of applications and kernel telemetry that is otherwise unavailable. But with operating systems frequently processing very large volumes of network data, even with an efficient framework and cheap eBPF program runs, costs can add up quickly.

Kubernetes 101: How To Set Up "Vanilla" Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source platform that, through a central API server, allows controllers to watch and adjust what’s going on. The server interacts with all the nodes to do basic tasks like start containers and pass along specific configuration items such as the URI to the persistent storage that the container requires. But Kubernetes can quickly get complicated. So, let’s look at Vanilla Kubernetes — the nickname for a a K8s setup that’s as basic and elementary as it gets.

Machine Learning at Splunk in Just a Few Clicks

The Machine Learning team at Splunk has been hard at work over the last several months preparing for a few exciting launches at.conf22, held just a few weeks ago. Splunk customers want to leverage machine learning (ML) in their environments, but many aren’t sure how to use it, or even how to get started.

Common Anomaly Detection Challenges & How To Solve Them

Anomaly detection can be defined by data points or events that deviate away from its normal behavior. If you think of this in the context of time-series continuous datasets, the normal or expected value is going to be the baseline, and the limits around it represent the tolerance associated with the variance. If a new value deviates above or below these limits, then that data point can be considered anomalous.

Network Performance Monitoring vs. Application Performance Monitoring: What's The Difference?

Network performance monitoring (NPM) and application performance monitoring (APM) are both key pillars of an overall performance and reliability management strategy, especially when dealing with complex, distributed infrastructure across cloud-native environments. NPM and APM also complement each other, in the sense that NPM can serve as an additional source of truth and observability for application performance.

State of Kubernetes 2022: Report Roundup

According to recent surveys and reports on the industry, Kubernetes and containers are more popular than ever. Containers and serverless functions are being mainstream and ubiquitous – with a more than 300% increase in container production usage in the past 5 years. This trend is especially true for large organizations, which are often using managed platforms and services.