Incident management is a set of processes used by operations teams to respond to latency or downtime, and return a service to its normal state. Incident management practices have long been well-defined through frameworks such as ITIL, but as software systems become more complex, teams increasingly need to adapt their incident management processes accordingly.

Our instrumentation uses built-in extension mechanisms where possible, such as Django’s database instrumentation. But often libraries have no such mechanisms, so we resort to wrapping third party libraries’ functions with our own decorators. For example, we instrument jinja2 ’s Template.render() function with a decorator to measure template rendering time. We value the correctness of our instrumentation a lot so that we do not affect our users’ applications.

Scaling sort of sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? One day, you’re carefree, the next you start to notice something is off… Maybe it’s the crashing, or the frequent dips in performance. Could it be the new hire? It’s not DNS. Is it DNS? Scaling is a natural part of the business process, and your infrastructure will start to change completely as your userbase doubles and triples.

Container technologies have captivated the computing world. Containers are the cornerstone for cloud computing and microservice architectures. Whether it be Docker™, Docker Compose™, or Kubernetes™, the IT world is embracing this technology with great enthusiasm. How can you monitor containers? They are different from traditional hosts and servers. For one thing, they are not physical machines; nor are they virtual machines.

IT applications are vital for today’s digital economy and for the business to succeed, these applications must be highly available and performing well. Application performance degradations can occur for several reasons. There may be code-level issues, database slowness, or network bandwidth constraints. IT applications run on servers and if the server is not sized correctly or is under-performing, application performance will degrade as well.

On Star Trek, there’s an incredibly useful device called the universal translator. As you’d expect, it allows everyone to understand each other. For example, if Captain Jean Luc Picard bumped into a race of aliens that bore a striking resemblance to Commander Riker’s beard, then they could set a date for some Earl Grey tea (hot) thanks to the universal translator. Without it, there might be grave misunderstandings and the firing of photon torpedoes.

For IT professionals, an enduring outage is one of the worst things that can happen. There goes your credibility, and here comes the executive team enraged and impatient. Now of course, given the distributed, multi-sourced nature of IT infrastructure, some outages are simply not preventable. The details are still emerging from the June 9th outage on IBM Cloud. ITPro Today interviewed Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti for some mitigation advice.

A type of credential reuse attack known as credential stuffing has been recently observed in higher numbers towards industry verticals. Credential stuffing is the process of automated probing of and access to online services using credentials usually coming from data breaches, or bought in the criminal underground.

If you’re a developer of .NET supporting enterprise apps developed in the .NET framework, you should know how the .NET 5 would impact your current enterprise app. Moving forward, there will be only one .NET to target macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and more. Along with the release, there are new .NET APIs, language features, and runtime capabilities. The look and feel of the code and project files in .NET 5 would be the same, regardless of the type of app being created.

Are most companies right now thinking ‘everybody back to the office’, or ‘remote work forever’? My guess is neither. There is still too much uncertainty for businesses to lean heavily towards one option or the other. Instead, flexible work makes the most practical sense right now and I imagine that won’t change for some time. Yet, with flexible work can come plenty of compliance problems that can frustrate even the most agile and experienced of IT departments.