Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

When you’re on call and get paged at an inconvenient time, you need to be able to quickly determine the seriousness of the issue and act decisively to reduce system downtime. But pager notifications often don’t give you the information you need to investigate an issue from your mobile device, meaning that access to a laptop at all times is a must.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose is a service for ingesting, processing, and loading data from large, distributed sources such as clickstreams into multiple consumers for storage and real-time analytics. AWS recently launched a new Kinesis feature that allows users to ingest AWS service logs from CloudWatch and stream them directly to a third-party service for further analysis.

I’ve recently co-founded a startup, and after working so long in more mature enterprises with diverse toolchains, it was actually massively educational to return to first steps and figure out what our critical needs were, balanced with essentially zero budget. As we’ve grown and raised money, we’ve graduated in some areas to other tools, but I wanted to share what we felt were the absolute can’t-live-without-tools for a team building SaaS software.