On December 7, 2021, Amazon’s cloud services recently suffered a major outage that not only affected Amazon services, but also many third-party services we use day-to-day, including Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Alexa, Amazon deliveries and Amazon Ring. Causes for the outage, which began at 7:30 am PST and lasted nearly seven hours, were detailed in a Root Cause Analysis report published by AWS that shed light on factors that may have contributed to the extended length of the disruption.

Some background. Having implemented at least 20 or more APM systems in production as an end-user at various companies, and both deployed and managed countless monitoring tools outside APM, I understand the role of the practitioner. Later on, I shifted to Gartner and led the APM Magic Quadrant for four years, finally spending another four years at AppDynamics (operating under Cisco after two years).

SaaS (software as a service) is the common model for many businesses today. Even longstanding behemoths such as Cisco and Microsoft have been strategically shifting their software products to SaaS and recurring revenue models (just think Office365 shift from licensed Office). These SaaS businesses need agility to move fast and remain competitive. This means agility in the IT stack, but also agility in the business models to support bottom-up GTM and product-led growth (PLG).

As an industry analyst at Gartner, we would often discuss whether people were in a centralized or decentralized cycle. In business, it’s normal to investigate options for creating innovation and moving quickly, or focus on reducing cost and optimizing teams and technologies.

The popularity of Prometheus speaks for itself. The project doesn’t post official numbers, but there are at least 500,000 companies using this project today as one of the most mature CNCF projects – one that has over 40k Github stars as of the writing of this blog. And since Prometheus is highly interoperable, compatibility is key. This comes into play not only with the exporters, but also with long-term storage options and alerting systems.

Windows applications constitute a large portion of the services and applications that run in many organizations. When moving to a Kubernetes-based architecture, there is a need to support these as well. Up until April 2020, the lack of container support within the Windows operating system left Linux container images as the only viable option for Kubernetes container deployment.

You have probably heard of Log4Shell, the security vulnerability that has ‘earned’ itself an NIST rank of 10: In this post I will show a really basic example of how this vulnerability actually works. I will walk you through some basic usage of the Log4J library and then show how some fairly basic inputs into this library can cause truly unexpected, and potentially disastrous, outcomes.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (a.k.a., EC2), is no doubt the core current computing infrastructure. It sits at the heart of AWS, the main kind of structure for housing virtual machines and containers for development and operations. Applying standards of observability with EC2 logs and obviously EC2 metrics (or any kind of AWS metrics for that matter) will inform you on if you have the right sorts of instances in place (and the appropriate size of those instances).

In this tutorial, we will go through a working example of a Node.js application auto-instrumented with OpenTelemetry. In our example we’ll use Express, the popular Node.js web application framework. Our example application is based on two locally hosted services sending data to each other. We will instrument this application with OpenTelemetry’s Node.js client library to generate trace data and send it to an OpenTelemetry Collector.

During Logz.io’s ScaleUp 2021 user conference, we announced that Unified Dashboards were coming to you soon. And now it’s finally here for anyone to try during the Public Beta. Unified Dashboards will allow Logz.io customers to analyze and filter their logs, metrics, and traces side-by-side on a single monitoring dashboard. Check out our recent blog to learn about why we built Unified Dashboards and the value they bring to customers.