In this new series of Now on Now stories, we share how we use ServiceNow products internally to transform our operations and create great experiences. We hope our stories will inspire you--our customers and partners--to achieve even greater business value and resiliency through the Now Platform®. For more information, visit the Customer Workflows Book of Knowledge.

Amazon CloudWatch — Amazon’s built-in infrastructure monitoring tool — monitors your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources and the applications you run on AWS in real time. Here’s what you can do with this tool and how to access AWS CloudWatch monitoring dashboards.

SignalFx was founded in 2013 to enable customers to gather and monitor key information for both their application code and infrastructure. The efficient metrics storage technology enables both high cardinality of metrics as well as the no-sample method of gathering every APM trace. This combination of efficiency and standardization is exposed through the SignalFlow language to allow access and manipulation of the vast amount of metric data.

The ITIC 2020 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Report released in April found that reliability declined in 67 percent of servers over four years old when corporations failed to retrofit or upgrade the hardware to accommodate increased workloads. This highlights the pressing need for hardware monitor solutions and the need for immediate alerting mechanisms to ensure the longest possible lifespan for hardware.

At Blameless, we value every opportunity to learn. Whether it’s taking time on Focus Fridays to attend a cool webinar, or conducting retrospectives for incidents, lost deals, events, and more, learning is core to our mission. To learn even more about our craft, we decided to start a book club at Blameless. People from every team (engineering, sales, SRE, marketing, product, people, and more) attended.

At iLert we embrace infrastructure as code and try to automate our processes whereever possible. This might reach from niftly little bash scripts to fully blown Terraform projects that spin up whole environments with as little as terraform apply on a CLI. With Hashicorp’s Terraform you can make use of infrastructure as code to provision and manage any cloud, infrastructure, or service.

In support of modern application development built on CI/CD, containers and open source, Google Cloud launched Artifact Registry (now generally available), a new artifact management solution. Sysdig helps DevOps teams using Artifact Registry confidently secure the build pipeline with comprehensive image scanning that identifies container vulnerabilities and misconfigurations to reduce risk.

Creating preview environments as a result of making pull requests is one of those practices that have vast potential and are yet largely overlooked. There is a strong chance that you are not using them, even though they can drastically increase productivity. I will not explain what preview environments are, besides stating that they are temporary environments created when pull requests are made and destroyed when PRs are closed.

We know, there’s a lot to love about the legendary GitKraken Git GUI. 😉 So much so, that you might not even know about some of the magical capabilities hiding beneath your fingertips. Our #GitKrakenTip series is meant to shed light on the unique delights offered by your favorite coding Kraken. The GitKraken graph offers a beautiful, technicolor visualization of your Git repository, but sometimes, you need to see more details related to your commits.

2020 has been a significant year for Africa’s cloud and data centre ecosystem. Considerable new investment is going into carrier-neutral data centres across Sub-Saharan Africa and slowly but surely the adoption of cloud services is gathering pace. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has led many businesses to accelerate their adoption of cloud services in order to help them operate during these difficult times.