Design applications to be modular. It’s a software design best practice. Modular programming is writing multiple independent programs that perform a single function but work together to achieve an overarching outcome. The benefit to this design is the smaller parts can be easily created and tested. New functionality can be slipped into the larger whole without interfering with other functions.

Now how many of you have better monitoring as part of your New Year’s resolution? You want to implement better monitoring into your Citrix environments, right?You want your end-users to experience less technical faults by having a system in place that allows you and the team to be more proactive. OK, probably not what you have been thinking as the clock struck midnight, but it should be part of your professional goals for 2020.

We’ve been told by the poets that the best things in life are free: A sunrise in spring, the scent of a flower, the coo of a baby, having a buddy who can get his hands on football tickets. It’s all so beautiful and uplifting (especially the football tickets). But at the same time, the economists remind us that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. And of course, we know from experience that this is often the case.

In December 2017, significant declines were recorded on the exchange rate of the world’s most popular digital currency—Bitcoin. Investors who wanted to sell their currencies quickly, for fear of further declines, turned to the biggest cryptocurrency stock exchange, known as Coinbase. At Coinbase, they did not seem stressed. Their service was unavailable for several hours, and investors switched to selling their Bitcoins on other exchanges.

Imagine that your API response includes data that you would like to track and get regular reports on, and you may even want to generate alerts when values hit certain thresholds. You’re already monitoring for API performance and function, but how about grabbing the other data at the same time. Wouldn’t it be nice to capture the data, evaluate it, and store it in your Uptrends account? You can with Uptrends’ newest Multi-Step API feature, Custom Metrics.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. Most companies use some type of “as-a-service” solution to optimize output, and this week, we shed some light on the latest “as-a-service” trend to hit the market, AI-as-a-Service.

I remember it like it was yesterday, but it was 20 years ago. As I approached my boss’s desk, I saw her do something amazing: she made a smaller window appear on top of her screen, displaying the icons of her open applications. She quickly toggled and selected another. In an instant, she’d gone from Outlook to Excel. No mousing around, no hunting to open the app. I squawked. What the heck was that? That, my friends, was my alt-tab Eureka! moment.

The increasing popularity of Git in the software industry has led to the introduction of numerous tools designed to make the version control experience faster and more intuitive. The most notable tool for enhancing a developer’s Git workflow is a graphical user interface (GUI). Most Git GUIs on the market today offer a variety of features for simplifying Git commands into quick actions; many also have a heavy focus on making collaboration easier.

Service desk or IT teams are critical to organisations for ensuring business continuity and service delivery. Hence, it becomes important for IT organizations to use a slew of metrics to measure how efficient their service desk is. With the recent advancement in IT Service Management (ITSM), the reporting capabilities offer multiple KPI metrics that can be measured and monitored. So, with the increase in service desk metrics, it becomes even more difficult to zero down on which metrics to measure.

Meet Stackdriver Logging, a gregarious individual who loves large-scale data and is openly friendly to structured and unstructured data alike. Although they grew up at Google, Stackdriver Logging welcomes data from any cloud or even on-prem. Logging has many close friends, including Monitoring, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage and all the other Google Cloud services that integrate with them. However, recently, they are looking for a deeper relationship to find insight.