Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In this article, we are going to look at the architecture of Apache ActiveMQ and how to monitor critical metrics of ActiveMQ using Hosted Prometheus and Hosted Grafana. If you would like to follow the steps in this blog, make sure to sign up for the MetricFire free trial. You can use Graphite and Grafana directly from our platform. MetricFire is a Hosted Graphite, Grafana and Prometheus service, where we do the setup and management of these open-source tools so you don’t have to.

The rapid pace of updates and upgrades to operating systems, software frameworks, libraries, programming language versions – a boon to the future of fast-paced software development, has also come to slightly bite us in the back because of having to manage these very many dependencies with their different versions across different environments.

For many software engineers and developers, using standard libraries or built-in objects is just not enough. To save time and increase efficiency, most developers build on work done by others. Whatever the coding problem, there is likely another programmer who has already created a solution for it. There is usually no need to repeat the problem-solving process. This principle is known as Do not Repeat Yourself or DRY.

An on-call schedule tells you and everyone in the team who will be the first responder when an issue happens in production. The on-call team member is responsible for investigating the issue, either fixing the issue herself or adding other people who can help fix it. Having an on-call schedule is important for building reliable systems because making someone responsible for production issues makes sure that they're not ignored.

Adding alerts across your monitoring tools is taking a proactive approach to reliability. But if there are too many alerts, then it can become counterproductive because team members will start ignoring alerts or remove the alerting altogether. Which is why you need a systematic approach to adding alerts and dealing with them.

DevOps has great potential; when it’s done right, it offers organizations improved collaboration, quick innovation, better quality, and shorter delivery cycles. But the reality is that some businesses don’t carry the DevOps process through to the data layer.

If you shudder thinking about compilation for different platforms, I know the feeling. One of the Java promises, the WORA (Write Once, Run Anywhere) principle, while revolutionizing platform independence, it stopped short of one more step – to be able to deploy anywhere. Personally, I think that WORADA sounds awesome, but I guess before Docker it didn’t occur to people that eliminating “works on my machine” is as simple as shipping your machine.

One of the advantages that Ubuntu brings to the cloud equation is improving an organization’s ability to run in multiple clouds. Running containers on top of Ubuntu further increases portability. Mist is an open-source multi-cloud management platform that helps teams centrally manage and control their Ubuntu instances across many different cloud environments and/or bare metal. This removes some of the operational and financial barriers to running applications in multiple clouds.

To keep up with today’s competitive landscape and with the new normal induced by the pandemic, organizations must modernize their ventures, instigate innovation and be more agile. However, the process of replacing legacy systems isn’t precisely as agile as one thinks it would be. It takes time, and that’s something your company doesn’t have. You need solutions that consolidate years of transformation into mere months.