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March 2020 Outage Report

It’s pretty safe to say that March was the month where everything changed for most of us. By now, enough has been said on coronavirus and we need not add to the pile. Our concern remains continuous uptime, and reporting on outages as teachable moments. During this time of heightened tensions, let’s take a few moments to do some post mortem work and see what we can learn from March’s outages.

SQL Server, Part 2: Authentication and authorization mechanisms in SQL Server, simplified

In the previous blog of this series, we discussed how monitoring SQL Server activities helps secure databases. The database security can further be reinforced by carefully configuring the authentication and authorization mechanisms for database accesses. In this blog, we’ll briefly explain the various authorization and authentication mechanisms of SQL Server and some best practices you can follow.

Your Status Page Deserves Its Own Domain

Public status pages have risen to become an essential requirement for all publicly facing web services. A well-constructed status page is a hallmark of a customer-centric organization. Status pages provide transparency and help reduce customer support requests during an inevitable outage. With sufficient component details, they can serve as useful information hubs for customers experiencing issues. There are numerous services to make setting up a status page simple and inexpensive.

Secured access to business-critical resources for your remote workforce

Over the past several years, telecommuting, or remote work, has gained significant traction across a wide variety of industries. According to a recent survey conducted by OWL Labs, 48 percent of employees worked from home at least once a week in 2019, and 34 percent were even willing to take a pay cut in order to work remotely.

How labels in Loki can make log queries faster and easier

For the majority of the first year that we worked on the Loki project, the questions and feedback seemed to come from people who were familiar with Prometheus. After all, Loki is like Prometheus – but for logs! Recently, however, we are seeing more people trying out Loki who have no Prometheus experience, and many are coming from systems with much different strategies for working with logs.

Customer Story: Why Freshly Cooks with Sentry

On the surface, food delivery service seems straightforward. However, creating a food delivery startup is more like building a transportation and logistics company than pizza delivery. Coordinating web and mobile applications for seamless ordering, tracking, and delivery, all within razor-thin service windows, takes an unprecedented level of complexity (when you get it right). And once you begin to scale service, the technical challenges become even greater.

Intelligent Monitoring of the End-User Experience is Necessary in Healthcare Environments More than Ever

Originally published by Theresa Miller, Citrix CTP and VMware vExpert Healthcare workers are finding themselves more overwhelmed than ever with COVID-19, and the Health IT Professionals that support these workers with technologies that must be online and high performing are equally stressed. There is no time for EHR (Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, MEDITECH) or other system failures. All technology vendors must work in concert to deliver a successful end-user experience.

Rails Performance: When is Caching the Right Choice?

We've all been there. You're clicking around your Rails application, and it just isn't as snappy as it used to be. You start searching for a quick-fix and find a lot of talk about caching. Take your existing app, add some caching, and voila, a performance boost with minimal code changes. However, it's not this simple. Like most quick fixes, caching can have long-term costs.

Sharing Context Across Space and Time: Honeycomb for Teams

When Charity and I started pitching Honeycomb, we had a “bit” we would do, on the importance of building for teams: I’d identify her as the {Kafka, Mongo, insert tech-of-the-moment here} expert on the team, identify myself as the newcomer, and pantomime awkwardly leaning over her shoulder to see how she debugged some unexpected behavior.