We had a blast at this year’s SREcon in Brooklyn, NY. The three-day event included meeting with integration partners and deepening our understanding of website reliability from a DevOps perspective.

Uptime.com and the Nagios monitoring tool serve similar functionality from a surface view. Both alert users to downtime, both offer extensive notification options, and both maintain an API for a variety of flexible use cases. However, these surface distinctions are the extent of the similarities between the two. Nagios Core and Uptime.com serve very different user types, and offer different benefits. You can think of Nagios as your internal safeguard, and there are some challenges to scaling.

Webhooks are like a secret backchannel to internet apps. They are a universal way to connect one thing to another, as long as you meet some important requirements: A service to pull data from, A place to receive the data pulled, A middleman to translate the data

There’s some research that points to the Iranian New Year as the source for spring cleaning. The idea was that the end of the colder months was an opportunity to “shake the house” (khooneh tekouni) to feel renewed. Nowruz, or new day, occurs on the first day of spring and like everyone else with a New Year resolution, the concept of cleaning and renewal was about setting a fresh start. Here we are, spring build alpha already deployed in some parts of the world.

It’s no secret that shoppers want a site that loads fast. Ecommerce websites have to balance looking good and working well to provide the best possible user experience. From product descriptions to user registrations to shopping carts, it can be overwhelming to figure out where to focus your site optimization efforts. Increasing your site’s loading time can double your conversions.

Site speed is critical to providing an optimal user experience and Google rankings. WordPress is an optimal platform for websites because of its flexibility. About 33% of all websites are built on it. Because of its popularity, there are a variety of technologies, frameworks and plugins available to site owners. While the flexibility is great, it also provides an overwhelming number of choices.

Uptime.com checks can send more than a thousand visits to a URL each day as it monitors infrastructure metrics. Checks record load times and tell administrators which elements are causing slowness. Basic HTTPS checks are the most common, checking for outages and recording downtime or providing technical data to fix them.

Website downtime is inevitable. Extreme weather, equipment upgrades, or major site updates are all ripe conditions for downtime. However, there’s always a problem we don’t see coming. A website backup and recovery plan is essential to keep unplanned downtime from severely impacting your business. If you already have a plan, use this guide to revise or make changes to your existing one.

With the constant threat of DDoS, DNS attacks, malware, and data breaches; website security is a top priority for today’s tech teams. You’ve taken the appropriate measures. Your domain uses HTTP/S, SSL encryption, and is locked up tight. Or is it? In 2018, Symantec reported over 70 million records were leaked or stolen because of misconfigured S3 buckets.

In today’s interconnected world, API monitoring is vital. Businesses rely on data in everyday operations, and often rely on Web APIs to send and access data. But if an API is down, slow or not behaving as expected, it can severely impact business operations. Whether you’re an API provider or rely on third-party APIs, continually monitoring your API environment lets you know when there’s a problem.