Editor's note: This blog post was originally published on relay.sh. Today we announce Relay, an event-driven automation platform. Sign up now and try it out! Relay connects infrastructure and operations platforms, APIs, and tools together into a cohesive, easy-to-automate whole. Relay is simple enough for you to start automating common, if-this-then-that (IFTTT) style DevOps tasks in minutes and powerful enough to model multi-step, branching, parallelized DevOps processes when the need arises.

Today marks five years since the start of the Mattermost open source project! We reflected on this exciting journey and reminisced about our missteps along the way. We’ve had many laughs and wanted to share them with our community.

IT professionals talk about automation… sometimes ad nauseum. We generally understand its value, even if we’re tribally divided by the specifics of its application. For civilians, automation is a catch-all for using technology to wield skills and abilities outside their experience (like placing an order through a complex infrastructure) and access the world of vendors and goods they wouldn’t have time to connect with on their own.

Ansible has become one of the most popular tools used by operations teams to automate their IT tasks. It allows them to quickly, and at the largest enterprise scale, manage the configuration of their IT systems. This includes software and infrastructure on-premise and in the cloud. Its open-source roots has allowed it to grow a large global community with an equally expansive ecosystem of integrations.

The number of publicly available Helm charts is continuously growing and while this is great for the community, it can be challenging to navigate the vast sea of Helm charts and Helm chart repositories. Like a ship’s captain, you need more than just a list of where you can go, but the details to ensure those under your charge arrive certainly and safely. Not just what can be seen on the surface, but what lies underneath, and the hazards that await.

The impacts of COVID-19 have been felt globally and across every industry. Supply chain businesses have faced a challenging few months and we’re not out of the woods yet. Warehouse and supply chain organisations in the UK have been contending with a 129% boom in online shopping, as non-essential shops have been closed and many consumers continue to favour online grocery shopping instead of braving the supermarket queues.

Our 2020 SRE Report is ready! We launched the SRE survey 2020 this January with the goal of understanding the current state of SRE. The survey covered a range of topics including: As we neared the end of the survey period, the SRE community was in the midst of a sudden change. SRE teams were forced to migrate to all-remote IT. We realized we would not be able to provide an accurate analysis without considering this shift in how SRE teams were operating in this new environment.

Getting started using Icinga in a single node setup can already be quite a challenge for new users. Configuring checks on multiple nodes can seem at lot harder. With this blog post I will show you how easy it is to configure hosts and services in such an environment. In this example our cluster will consist of one master and two agents and we will use the command endpoint method to execute checks on our agents.

For better or for worse, we have become a society obsessed with efficiency. There are watermarks of it in every corner of our lives—from digital banking and e-commerce apps to smart thermostats and doorbells. Yet, despite us using automation in almost all aspects of our personal lives, a joint study conducted by PagerDuty and Dimensional Research found that, in contrast, 90% of companies have little to no automation for issue resolution.

If you’ve worked with Elastic Support, you may have been asked to run the Support Diagnostic tool and provide the output in your support case. This is a common practice, but a lot of you out there may not know why. While the short answer is "it depends", this blog is going to explain why we keep asking for diagnostic files (as well as what’s in them). Simply put, the Support Diagnostic helps Elastic Support understand the state of your cluster.