In part one, we introduced the duality of observability, controllability. As a reminder, observability is the ability to infer the internal state of a "machine” from externally exposed signals. Controllability is the ability to control input to direct the internal state to the desired outcome. So observability is a loop problem. And we need to stop treating it as the end state of our challenge in delivering performant, quality experiences to our users and customers.

In this article: Infrastructure monitoring systems have been undergoing massive change in the past few years. Before the proliferation of cloud computing, IoT and edge computing, mobile apps and SaaS apps, the practice was fairly static, albeit traditionally quite siloed. IT managers needed to get data on a set of standard metrics, from a handful of tools.

Modern systems have resulted in an explosion of complexity for organizations of every size, shape, and purpose. In an effort to create more resilient and reliable software, we’ve cast around for solutions to tame and manage this complexity. Observability practices have come to be seen as essential for operating systems at scale, but in practice, they’re often seen as technical solutions to what is ultimately a social problem: Software, at the end of the day, is built and run by people.

The COVID-19, or Coronavirus, crisis has made significant impacts on the lives of every one of us, let alone the way organizations operate. Working from home is becoming a norm for companies to ensure their staff’s safety, prevent the spread of the virus, and follow the restrictions of the government.

A PHP application might produce many different levels of earning and errors during its execution. Being able to see these errors is essential for developers trying to troubleshoot a misbehaving application. However, developers often have trouble when trying to display errors from their PHP applications. Instead, their apps just fail silently. If you are having problems with your PHP web application and need to display all the errors and warnings, you are in the right place.

A selection of this week’s more interesting vulnerability disclosures and cyber security news. For a daily selection see our twitter feed at #ionCube24. With all the wild stuff going on right now, and I don’t know if it’s cabin fever causing regression, but I seem to home in on some almost retro items of news this week. The first, not so much that they were hit by a card skimmer, more that I didn’t realise they were still with us.

What’s the best IT monitoring software of 2020? It’s an interesting question. IT monitoring could mean a whole lot of things to a whole lot of different organizations. To some teams, a robust application performance monitoring (APM) solution might be more important than their network performance monitoring (NPM) tools.

In my last post I walked through a brief introduction to Application Insights, and APM tools in general, and hopefully the simple outside-in availability test I concluded the chapter with has been a useful starting point for you on your APM journey. In this post, I’m going to dig deeper into Application Insights and walk you through a use case that should make the purpose of Application Insights really clear.

The waves of change are certainly upon us and businesses are being forced to adapt at a record pace. Current world events have caused a jarring shift in all aspects of our lives, accelerating major changes in how we live and work. An unprecedented number of people are now working from home. Those of us working in IT Operations are no exception. Many companies are implementing a Distributed IT Operations Center (D-NOC) approach to address this new reality.

Communicating an ongoing crisis is a mammoth task for any business. Even more so in the time of a pandemic like the novel coronavirus. Unless you have a detailed crisis communication plan in place, the lack of clarity and information might put your frontline support reps in a tight spot when they are trying to reassure your customers.