December was a busy month with systems we don’t normally see experiencing server downtime. Our first story, in particular, is an excellent example of how complicated monitoring can get as infrastructure grows. We saw every level get hit, from the government to big-name players, with ransomware being one of the major thorns in our collective sides. But we also bring you the heartwarming tale of the little Minecraft Server that could.

Have you ever dealt with a unicode bug? Where plain text — the substance you work with all day — can no longer be trusted? It can be disorienting to say the least! This article will help prepare you so that the next time that happens you’ll be able to spend less time hyperventilating and more time troubleshooting.

84.51°, the data analytics and marketing company owned by The Kroger Company, found out it needed centralized metrics the hard way. When Erin O’Brien was brought into the company in the spring of 2019 as a Lead Service Manager, she was tasked with evaluating and seeking ways to continuously improve how the Technology and Product teams worked together.

It’s a new year, so what will 2020 have in store for SRE? Here’s our two cents: SRE adoption will only continue to grow. However, the practice and culture shift, rather than the role, will take priority in 2020. More people (not just SREs) will have a reliability mindset, shifting reliability left through the software lifecycle. SLIs, SLOs, and error budget policies will become common practice to make this shift actionable.

Atlassian and Opsgenie are among the most popular apps in the Okta network this year, according to a new report from the security company. From the report: Okta’s Business @ Work 2020 Report takes an in-depth look at how organizations and people work, exploring industries and customers, and the applications and services they use to harness productivity.

Beats are lightweight, purpose-built agents that acquire data and then feed it to Elasticsearch. Beats use the libbeat framework that makes it easy to create customized beats for any type of data you’d like to send to Elasticsearch. Auditbeat is a lightweight shipper from the Beats family that you can install on your servers to audit the activities of users and processes on your systems.

In any rapidly emerging market, consultants can be a great source for vendor-neutral insights, as they typically work with multiple technologies to help their customers make informed decisions. In that vein, Derya (Dorian) Sezen of kloia, a new-era consulting organization that provides services toward transition of legacy workloads to frontline technologies in Cloud, DevOps and Microservices, recently wrote a blog summarizing his experience with Rancher and Red Hat OpenShift.

Jira is one of the most popular platforms to plan software development work and to track work. Teams use Jira to create user stories, create and assign tickets, document and track issues and bug fixes, and track the entire development cycle from conception to release. Jira is incredibly useful, but it can also create a lot of email notifications whenever stories or tickets are added, changed, reassigned, or resolved.

See how AppDynamics Experience Journey Map and Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer deliver a premiere solution for building world-class digital experiences.

Serverless development opens lots of new opportunities, and if you’re invested in serverless (or you’ve been following the hype) you’ll know that cost efficiency is principal among those benefits. Simply put, we can save money by choosing the right tool for the right task. Since a distributed microservices architecture is made up of many managed services it’s a simple task to change out the building blocks of a particular application flow.