I’ve built a lot of InfluxDB servers in my time here, and I’ve built some pretty esoteric ones at that, but I think I’ve finally pulled off what can only be described as the World’s Smallest InfluxDB Server! Back in the summer of 2019, I saw a project on CrowdSupply.com for something called the ‘Giant Board’. It looked really, really cool! A complete Single Board Computer (SBC) that ran Linux, all in a Feather form factor. I immediately backed it!

In our previous blog post we discussed the challenges with relying on external servers for downloading pre-build tools such as Curl, CLI, wget, Maven, Gradle, npm and others. We discussed how they can sometimes cause stability issues, also called “Environmental Issues”, that will break the build.

Monitoring your application from end to end is important for ensuring that core functionalities work as designed. Datadog’s browser tests help you verify that key user workflows—such as signing up for a new account—are consistent across devices and locations. Within these workflows, email often plays a key role in onboarding users and providing customers with important information about their accounts and application activity, such as profile changes and order confirmations.

From monolithic architecture to distributed systems and microservices, the art of application development has changed over the years, and the needs for monitoring those applications have evolved with it. Application performance monitoring (APM) solutions now meet the monitoring needs of all applications deployed across various platforms, be it on-premise, cloud, or even hybrid models.

In today’s post, we’ll look at system tests in Rails 6. System tests are meant to auto-test the way users interact with your application, including the Javascript in your user interface. Minitest, being the default testing framework in Rails, is a great match for system testing. With all the configuration that Rails handles for us, there are just a few steps needed before we have our first tests up and running.

At its core, Sentry is a tool that alerts you to defects in your production software. But it does more than blast stack traces into your inbox: Sentry provides powerful workflows to help your team determine root cause, triage issues to your team, and keep tabs on ongoing concerns with comments and notifications. These collaborative features can help you resolve problems with your software quickly.

I have been a Grafana power user since almost the day it was conceived. During this time, I’ve gotten acquainted with a few quirks but also many features, some of which are rather obscure. One of these features that few know about but I absolutely love is annotations.

How well positioned is your team to ship reliable software? What are the different roles in engineering that impact reliability, and how do you optimize the ratio of software engineers to SREs to DevOps within teams? These questions can be hard to answer in a quantifiable way, but projecting different scenarios using systems thinking can help. Will Larson’s blog post Modeling Reliability does just that, and serves as inspiration for this article.

At Rollbar, we care about reducing the time it takes developers to find and fix errors. This is why we’re making our integration with GitHub even stronger to provide more context around errors and reduce the mean time it takes to resolve them MTTR. Last year, we launched Code Context to show additional lines of code within each frame of the stack trace, reducing the back and forth between GitHub and Rollbar.