We’re back with another employee spotlight! Last month, we spoke to Senior Front-End Developer Mark Smith, who works out of our San Francisco office. This month, we (virtually) crossed over to the opposite coast and spent some time getting to know Marguerite des Trois Maisons, who works out of our new Toronto office as the product owner on our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team.

We recently shipped an update to navigating inside Honeycomb. Thus far, results have been positive – thank you! We wanted to give you a behind the scenes look at why and how this work came along. It’s easy to develop a certain blindness after working with your own code day-in day-out. Staring at something over a long period of time wears down the jagged edges that once used to protrude and now appear as normal.

At Monitorama 2018, I shared some of the cool process and knowledge I’ve learned from developing a product for people other than myself to consume. After spending six years on call, I now build software that wakes people up in the night — AKA, infrastructure and tooling for systems monitoring and performance analysis. As someone who’s been there, I’m conscientious about building quality software that people delight in using.

We live a busy life and as a result, we all forget to get some tasks done on time. The fact is that some things should not be delayed and a good example of this renewing your SSL / TLS certificates. What an SSL certificate does is to allow a person, a computer or an organization to exchange information in a secure way.

As an IT pro, making sure that the end users have a good experience is one of the most important parts of the job. It’s so important in fact, that there are numerous tools available for monitoring the performance of end user sessions. In most cases, such monitoring tools work by examining a series of performance counters in an effort to quantify the end user experience. In reality, however, performance data and what the end users actually experience can be two very different things.

AIOps is the application of analytics and machine learning to automate some aspects of DevOps and IT operations management. Like all new technologies, it may take time to discover the best ways to get practical results. However, AIOps is already showing a lot of promise in three key uses cases.

One of the features we love about RapidSpike is the sheer amount of data we collect about the performance of our customers’ websites. We are able to use this data to provide great insight into real user experiences and, crucially, how to improve those experiences. However not everyone has time to analyse that data, or knows exactly what to look for.