The incident response industry is anything but static, and it is often said that the key to staying ahead is staying informed. But that’s easier said than done. Faced with the increasing sophistication of cyber attacks and the growing complexity of IT architectures, we often drown in our daily slew of tickets and alerts, with no time left to spare.
Modern hybrid, multi-cloud, and cloud native environments have created increased management complexity for enterprise IT teams. Dynamic and distributed applications, infrastructure and business-critical services are constantly generating more data in the form of metrics, events, and alerts.
Software has eaten the world and every company today is a software company. This is because every company today is more and more serving its customers digitally. That service can be a spectrum, such as offering traditional physical products and services through digital channels on one end to offering entirely new digital products on the other end. Regardless of where on the spectrum a company is, it does not change the fact that its primary interface with its customers has become its software.
One of my earliest jobs was as an admin for an MSP. We'd routinely generate alerts that weren't actionable, lacked context, and for most of our customers, were considered noise. From a monitoring perspective, it was bad. Customers didn't trust in the alerts they received and often resorted to having some additional monitoring product installed on their systems. It's safe to say that our auto-generated tickets and emails were largely ignored.
Netdata must be doing something right when it comes to inspiring contributions. Our open-source, distributed monitoring agent has on GitHub and has seen contributions from hundreds of people: . We’ve even hired a handful of our contributors to work full-time on making the Netdata ecosystem even more powerful. The community is passionate about what we’re building, and they’re actively interested in making it work better for their particular needs.
Apache Tomcat is the most popular application server for serving Java applications. Widely-used, mature and well documented, Tomcat can probably be defined as the de-facto industry standard. Some sources put Tomcat’s market share at over 60%! Tomcat is particularly popular for serving smaller applications since it doesn’t require the full Java EE platform. It consumes a relatively small amount of resources and provides users with simpler admin features.
There is no denying the popularity of PHP. It has been a constant force in the web development world since its release way back in 1995. And now in 2019, thanks to Laravel, it is still going as strong as ever! Here at Scout, recently we have been working hard on providing a PHP performance monitoring agent to sit alongside our existing ruby, python and elixir agents.
The other day a long-time customer wrote in with a problem. They use Honeybadger to monitor their Ruby apps for exceptions but were having trouble catching timeouts. If their app took too long to respond, their application server, Puma, would abort the request. The only insight their team had into this problem was through Puma's logs. Most people consider timeouts to be a kind of error, so it'd be nice to have them reported by Honeybadger like any other errors.
We can sift through oceans of data. Alert on predetermined parameters. Deliver multiple commits a day. But as organizations leverage these layered, complex monitoring systems, “we also have to start practicing observability to enrich the actions that we take to solve problems as they occur and drive continual improvement,” said VictorOps Product Marketing Manager Melanie Postma. VictorOps is one tool that can help accomplish that.
Every developer’s worst nightmare is having to dig through a huge log file trying to pinpoint problems. The troubleshooting most likely won’t stop there. They’ll either have to follow the trail to multiple other log files and possibly on other servers. The log files may even be in different formats. This may go on until one loses themselves completely. Log aggregation is what you need to stop this seemingly never-ending cycle.
