Understanding the context of an IT incident can greatly reduce the MTTR and enhance the ability to determine the root cause. In an IT environment, ‘context’ is used to refer to the subset of information necessary to troubleshoot and diagnose an incident, or event. For some scenarios, the context may be the downstream dependencies after a high availability pair of firewalls goes offline, and in others, it may be the datastore in contention from multiple VMs.

If you’re running a production application, you need metrics. There are great products out there that allow you to gain visibility into how your application is performing, give some nice graphs, and charge you for it. In the Rails community, this is commonly achieved by using NewRelic and Skylight. But for some of us, we achieve visibility by using Prometheus and Grafana that we build and host ourselves.

In today’s software-driven economy, every organization faces an imperative to modernize the way they deliver software in order to adapt and enable the digital era — or perish. Digital transformation across industries is driving the need for IT to enable Cloud-Native applications. This has led enterprises to adopt Kubernetes as the most effective way to support cloud-native architectures and to modernize their applications and IT infrastructure.

Docker is a powerful tool for creating and deploying applications. It simplifies rolling out applications across multiple systems and is a useful tool for integrating new technologies. An application that runs using Docker will start up the same every time on every system. This means that if the application works on your local computer, it’ll work anywhere that supports Docker. That’s great news! It simplifies your development process and can be a powerful tool for continuous delivery.

While using Kubernetes clusters of different distributions like – AKS, GKE, EKS, OpenShift, and ICP we need to give specific privileges to a specific user/user group. During this process, to give restricted access to a cluster we can make use of a service account.

As Stephen Marsland once said, “if data had mass, the earth would be a black hole.” A vast part of the immense amount of structured and unstructured data that we call “Big Data” is nothing but machine-originated log data. Logs are generated for a lot of different purposes – from security to debugging and troubleshooting. They constitute a gold mine of useful information and actionable insights if properly stored, managed, and analyzed.

The growing threat of attacks and data breaches on IT systems has made security monitoring more crucial now than ever before. Organizations of all sizes face risks to their data, and without the proper tools in place, a single attack could pose a severe threat to your operations.

The 2019 edition of PyCon USA takes place over the next few days in Cleveland, Ohio. Scout is delighted to be there, sharing our APM tool with the Python community. Plus, we'll have great t-shirts and stickers for you, and we love to get geeky - one of our lead product engineers, plus two of our smart support engineers, are working the booth, ready to help you figure out your Python performance problems.

Insights have landed on the RapidSpike platform! One of our most exciting feature updates for 2019, Insights scores your website on a variety of criteria and gives you recommendations on how to enhance your digital ecosystem and improve your overall customer experience.