Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Blue Matador

Monitoring Amazon Classic Elastic Load Balancers with Blue Matador

AWS Elastic Load Balancing is one of the most widely used of Amazon’s cloud services. In many AWS stacks, an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) will be involved in almost every single request that customers make to your application. Since they are critical to the health of your application, properly monitoring ELBs is a top priority for most teams. In this blog post, we will go over how Blue Matador monitors Classic Elastic Load Balancers automatically and without configuration.

How to Monitor Amazon CloudFront with CloudWatch

Amazon CloudFront is a CDN that allows you to serve content from edge locations without having to actually stand up infrastructure around the world. However, since it’s a managed service, you have less visibility with traditional monitoring tools. As such, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring tools in AWS. In this post, we’ll explain how to use CloudWatch to monitor CloudFront and what is important to watch.

Announcing The Close of Our Seed Round: $3.1 Million

The round was led by Peterson Ventures, with participation from new investors Prelude Venture Fund, SaaS Ventures, and Forward Venture Capital and participation from existing investors Trilogy Equity Partners and Cobre Capital. It has been amazing to see the positive feedback we’ve received from our customers as we work to make the first fully automated infrastructure monitoring and alerting solution.

Kubernetes Security Essentials

Getting started with Kubernetes is really easy. In just a matter of minutes you can set up a new cluster with minikube, kops, Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine, or Azure Kubernetes Service. What isn’t so easy is knowing what to do after you set up your cluster and run a few apps. One of the most important parts of setting up a Kubernetes cluster is to make sure your cluster is secure. In this blog post, we will go over some of the strategies you can use to help secure your Kubernetes cluster.

When to Scale Up in RDS: Freeable Memory

Monitoring freeable memory will help you know when it is time to scale your Amazon RDS cluster. Freeable memory is not reported by the database, but rather by the OS. Freeable memory is the combination of unused and temporarily used memory. It is the memory that the system can grant without adverse effects. When an Amazon RDS instance runs out of freeable memory the OS may do up to three things.

S3 Endpoint Connectivity in AWS VPC

There are a few, simple things in life I really, truly enjoy: a full breath of air, watching my kids learn and grow, and playing the piano immediately come to mind. I was reminded of another one after spending an hour with CameronB from DevOpsChat — full understanding of a complex problem. For me, it’s not finding a fix that works, I have to continue until I understand the underlying issues, but then it’s bliss.

When to Scale Up in RDS: 7 Critical Metrics

RDS is Amazon's managed relational database service. While RDS manages your databases maintenance, uptime and upgrade it is your responsibility to determine the cluster's scale and capacity. So the big question is when do you need to scale up? To answer this question you should understand and monitor seven metrics for each server in your cluster. They are: Database connections, Freeable memory, CPU credit balance, Free local storage, Replica lag, Commit latency, Select latency

How to Monitor Amazon ECS with CloudWatch

Amazon ECS allows you to run Docker containers your application without having to actually manage physical hardware (or virtual hardware, in the case of the Fargate launch type). However, since it’s a managed service, you have less visibility with traditional monitoring tools. As such, it becomes even more important to take advantage of the available monitoring tools in AWS. In this post, we’ll explain how to use CloudWatch to monitor ECS and what is important to watch.