Here’s the second issue of SREview! This monthly zine features epic Tweets, content, and events happening in the SRE and resilience engineering community.

Desktop applications are self-contained programs that operate without any external hosting software. While a web application typically requires a web server to translate the program into HTML content for the web browser to consume, desktop applications deliver the service directly to end-users. We use a number of desktop applications day to day, like conferencing tools, stock management software, source control desktop applications like GIT and Tortoise, photo editing tools, and so on.

There are a lot of great things about Grafana 7.0, but one of my favorite features is the new React-based plugin platform, which has a set of new APIs and design system to help you build your own plugin. The process is easier and faster than ever. In this blog post, I’ll show how you can create a panel plugin for visualizing scatter plots. A scatter plot is a type of graph that displays values for (usually) two variables as a set of points along a horizontal and vertical axis.

Logging is a critical component of your cloud infrastructure and provides valuable insight into the performance of your systems and applications. On Google Cloud, Cloud Logging is a service that allows you to store, search, monitor, and alert on log data and events from your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) infrastructure services and your applications. You can view and analyze log data in real time via Logs Viewer, command line or Cloud SDK.

Text encoding is fundamental to programming. Web sites, user data, and even the code we write are all text. When encoding breaks, it can feel like the floor is falling out from under you. You're cast into a dimension of bitmasks and codepoints. Logs and backtraces are useless. You consider trading your text editor for a hex editor. But there's hope! In this article, Jose Manuél will show us how encoding errors happen, how they're expressed in Ruby, and how to troubleshoot them.

Managing a complex microservice-based architecture requires defending multiple endpoints. Automating security covers a vast amount of tools and methodologies, so making sure they all communicate is critical. Additionally, tool sprawl in any aspect of DevOps requires putting automation to good use. The Logz.io Cloud SIEM focuses on identifying threats. To optimize its effectiveness, we have negotiated and built out multiple integrations tying complementary tools together.

PHP is one of the most popular programming languages on the web. It powers many widely used content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, and provides the backbone for modern server-side frameworks like Laravel and Symfony. Despite its popularity, PHP has a bit of a reputation for being slow and hard to maintain. It has gotten better in recent years, but there are two features that high-performance PHP applications will likely need: OPcache and PHP FastCGI Process Manager (PHP-FPM).

On May 27, the first OpenObservability Conference was held to bring together leaders, practitioners, and users of leading open source observability tools for sessions on the experiences, strategies, and future of the industry. For the Logz.io team, as long-time proponents of open source, it was rewarding to see everyone come together to explore the challenges and opportunities of open source observability.

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.