Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

There are a number of challenges to surmount for enterprises in the IoT sector, including having a short time to market, airtight security, a versatile update mechanism for hardware and software and mastering device management. The more planning and practical steps that are taken to address key considerations, the faster an IoT project can get to market and make an impact on the world.

The scenario: you want to see distributed traces, maybe for your web app. You’ve set up an OpenTelemetry collector to receive OTLP traces in JSON over HTTP, and send those to Honeycomb (how to do that is another post, and we’ll link it here when it’s up).

The combination of SNS to SQS to Lambda is a common sight in serverless applications on AWS. Perhaps triggered by messages from an API function. This architecture is great for improving UX by offloading slow, asynchronous tasks so the API can stay responsive. It presents an interesting challenge for observability, however. Because observability tools are not able to trace invocations through this combination end-to-end. In X-Ray, for example, the trace would stop at SNS.

One of the greatest challenges that operators and developers face is infrastructure provisioning: it should be resilient, reliable, reproducible and even audited. This is where Infrastructure as Code (IaC) comes in. In the last few years, we have seen many tools that tried to solve this problem, sometimes offered by the cloud providers (AWS CloudFormation) or vendor-agnostic solutions like Terraform and Pulumi.

Successful IT operations management (ITOM) of today’s complex enterprise infrastructure requires collecting a lot of data and making informed, automated decisions based on the insights contained in that data.