How is the incident response process set up at your organization? At PagerDuty, our approach is to holistically look at your infrastructure, your customer-facing applications, and your products. We distinguish these by describing these items as “services” that roll up to and make up a “business service.” This setup allows teams to better manage these services so that when incidents do happen, responders can gain context much faster. But how?

We recently sponsored our partner CloudBees’ conference DevOps World & JenkinsWorld in San Francisco and our message “Observe how Customers Experience Your Build” resonated well with the folks we met. Release engineers are critical to the continuous delivery cycle and knowing the right time to ship is important for internal business stakeholders but more importantly end-user customers and especially if it’s a significant release.

Thanks to advancements in JavaScript engines, the performance of websites has considerably improved in recent years. However, there are aspects of websites that are out of the control of engines and yet to be adequately optimized by browsers. One of these aspects is the number of HTTP requests that your webpage makes.

Today we are happy to announce the general availability of CFEngine 3.15.0 beta. CFEngine 3.15 is our upcoming LTS (Long Term Support) release. The main focus of this release has been the new Federated Reporting feature. It also contains a lot of performance work and stability improvements.

There’s a huge need among our Metrictank and Grafana Cloud customers to be able to import their existing data from Graphite, so we recently refactored the importer tools to make the process easier. A few years ago, I wrote a utility to import Whisper data into Cassandra. At that time, Cassandra was the only store that Metrictank supported. But since then, we’ve added Bigtable, and we’ll likely add more stores.

Complex problems can often be solved with simple, practical solutions. That’s what our team at Kenshoo discovered when we realized that we needed a way to easily and proactively track specific log messages which indicate mission-critical events.

We’re quickly approaching an important inflection point in the cloud migration timeline. 451 Research estimates that by the end of next year, company-owned data centers will dip below 50% of primary IT environments as organizations move their IT investments to the cloud. They’re deciding overwhelmingly that they no longer want pets running their critical applications, they want herds of cattle.

Support for relational databases is a growing focus for Kubernetes users, and the release of Windows Server 2019 is expanding options for .NET applications and SQL Server. SQL Server workloads, however, often rely on Active Directory and Windows Auth, and storage arrays, which will not be supported by SQL Server containers on Windows Server 2019. Fortunately, a new Rancher Labs partner, Windocks, offers new options for SQL Server on Kubernetes and Rancher.

We are delighted to welcome guest blogger Brian Wren of Microsoft. Brian is something of a superstar in the SCOM world – and you will see why when you check out his technical guides on TechNet or Microsoft Learn. His series on Management Pack Authoring for SCOM is a definitive guide that has helped many of us get started with a difficult topic. It is fair to say that when Brian works his magic, he makes the complicated perfectly understandable.

When adding a new feature to Checkly or refactoring some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda.