IT applications are vital for today’s digital economy and for the business to succeed, these applications must be highly available and performing well. Application performance degradations can occur for several reasons. There may be code-level issues, database slowness, or network bandwidth constraints. IT applications run on servers and if the server is not sized correctly or is under-performing, application performance will degrade as well.

On Star Trek, there’s an incredibly useful device called the universal translator. As you’d expect, it allows everyone to understand each other. For example, if Captain Jean Luc Picard bumped into a race of aliens that bore a striking resemblance to Commander Riker’s beard, then they could set a date for some Earl Grey tea (hot) thanks to the universal translator. Without it, there might be grave misunderstandings and the firing of photon torpedoes.

For IT professionals, an enduring outage is one of the worst things that can happen. There goes your credibility, and here comes the executive team enraged and impatient. Now of course, given the distributed, multi-sourced nature of IT infrastructure, some outages are simply not preventable. The details are still emerging from the June 9th outage on IBM Cloud. ITPro Today interviewed Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti for some mitigation advice.

If you’re a developer of .NET supporting enterprise apps developed in the .NET framework, you should know how the .NET 5 would impact your current enterprise app. Moving forward, there will be only one .NET to target macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and more. Along with the release, there are new .NET APIs, language features, and runtime capabilities. The look and feel of the code and project files in .NET 5 would be the same, regardless of the type of app being created.

Are most companies right now thinking ‘everybody back to the office’, or ‘remote work forever’? My guess is neither. There is still too much uncertainty for businesses to lean heavily towards one option or the other. Instead, flexible work makes the most practical sense right now and I imagine that won’t change for some time. Yet, with flexible work can come plenty of compliance problems that can frustrate even the most agile and experienced of IT departments.

We've just rolled out another new feature: a 'Stats Overview' area where you can view a summary of the stats for all your monitors at a glance. There have been several requests for this feature from customers who want to view the most important stats for their websites in one place. Here are the details...

HiveMQ is an open source MQTT-compliant broker for enterprise-scale IoT environments that lets you reliably and securely transfer data between connected devices and downstream applications and services. With HiveMQ, you can provision horizontally scalable broker clusters in order to achieve maximum message throughput and prevent single points of failure.

Tracing is a widely adopted solution to provide performance insights into distributed applications. It is a valuable resource for developers to view the service call graph and track service latency at a granular level. It’s also a handy tool for on-call engineers to drill down and debug a problematic service during an outage. There are a number of open source distributed tracing frameworks out in the wild, including Jaeger, Zipkin, and OpenTelemetry.

If you follow our very own @HLENKE, you might have seen his recent tweet. Availability and responsiveness are key topics for every SaaS platform. They also happen to be multi-level, complex topics that often span different technology stacks and can be tackled with a variety of approaches. Hannes' tweet actually gives us the perfect segue into a blog post about how our engineering team currently monitors Checkly.