Having visibility into your Java application is crucial for understanding how it works right now, how it worked some time in the past and increasing your understanding of how it might work in the future. More often than not, analyzing logs is the fastest way to detect what went wrong, thus making logging in Java critical to ensuring the performance and health of your app, as well as minimizing and reducing any downtime.

Monitoring your system and infrastructure is critical to ensure the performance of your services. In fact, as software development moves faster and faster, alerting and monitoring becomes an indispensable practice for modern DevOps teams. Why is that exactly? That’s what I’m going to discuss today.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen an almost obsession with developing and adopting CI/CD tools throughout the DevOps community. There are thousands of “how-to’s”, “top x tools”, and “tool x vs tool y” type articles, and it has gotten to the point where it’s quite difficult to figure out how and which one to pick as your own.

If you are anything like us here at Sematext, you are likely always trying to automate any tedious, repetitive tasks. Repetitio est mater… boringdorum. Setting up monitoring falls in that category. You either do it manually every time you provision a new piece of infrastructure or service, or you automate it. Note that by “service” I mean either an instance of your own application or something like Nginx or Elasticsearch or MySQL or …

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) provides block storage for applications that are running in the cloud. However, not every company is getting the most out of the EBS volumes they are using. Some companies can pay too much for EBS volumes without utilizing the allocated storage and IOPS. Other organizations may pay high prices because they are using the wrong disk type for their needs. This article explains five techniques you can use to optimize the performance of your EBS workloads.

When it started to really get traction as a concept, almost 10 years ago, DevOps was primarily used to push rapid changes to web environments with minimal impact for the users. That might still be true today but DevOps as a concept evolved. A lot. We now rely on DevOps models to move at high velocity, adapting and developing at speeds that are light years away from anything we’ve seen before. It’s the way we deliver, test, monitor, and release functionalities.

TL;DR note: if you want the bzip2 -9 version of this post, scroll down to the very last section for some quick pointers. If you want to learn a bit about Linux system logs, please continue, as we’ll talk about all these and more.

No matter which path of the stack you work on, it’s crucial you make sure your website or API is up and running. We wanted to create a tool that can give you superpowers. Enter, Sematext Synthetics! You can monitor the availability of APIs and websites as well as their performance, and user journeys. This means 24×7 monitoring from multiple locations around the globe with alerts when things go wrong!

Apache Solr was always ready to be extended. What was only needed is a binary with the code and the modification of the Solr configuration file, the solrconfig.xml and we were ready. It was even simpler with the Solr APIs that allowed us to create various configuration elements – for example, request handlers. What’s more, the default Solr distribution came with a few plugins already – for example, the Data Import Handler or Learning to Rank.