Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The observability market is maturing. This evolution is clearly visible in the rise of OpenTelemetry, an open source framework for application performance monitoring and observability.

In the world of IT, there are two main approaches to managing changes—the information technology infrastructure library (ITIL) and continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD). Both have their own benefits and drawbacks, so it’s important to understand the difference between them before deciding which one is right for your organization. In this article, learn about the difference between CI/CD and ITIL, and find out which approach is best for your needs.

Our industry has always had localized expressions for work that was necessary but didn’t move the company forward. The SRE movement calls this type of work “toil.” The concept of toil is a unifying force because it provides an impartial framework for identifying — then containing — the work that takes up our time, blocks people from fulfilling their engineering potential, and doesn’t move the company forward.

If you're involved in deploying and managing applications and servers, you know that it is a complex and resource-intensive process. Container orchestration platforms help automate the deployment, scaling, and management of your applications, but the challenges don’t stop there. Everything from the way applications communicate, down to the underlying infrastructure they run on, exposes vulnerabilities, complexities, and builds up technical debt.

We recently held a webinar, “Find Value at the Edge: Innovation Opportunities and Use Cases,” where Forrester Principal Analyst Michele Pelino was our guest speaker. After the event, we held a Q&A with Pelino highlighting edge infrastructure solutions and benefits. Here’s a look into the interview.

CI/CD is the process that ensures that code updates are deployed efficiently and reliably. However, more than simply having CI/CD pipelines is required for modern business application development needs. The problems start as soon as your team grows, but your CI/CD process does not. Static CI/CD pipelines result in an operational bottleneck and slow down your application workflow. Today, we will discuss why scaling your CI/CD is an inevitable need for your organization.

Errors are part of building software. Even if you are one of the fabled 10X engineers, errors are still going to happen. When an error does occur, typically you are going to look at the stack trace to understand the why and who for triaging. But figuring out who to assign an issue to just based on the stack trace can be difficult. How many times do you see a stack trace in a Sentry issue, head to GitHub, and try to figure out who changed the line of code in question? Often would be our guess.

As 2022 draws to a close, I thought it would be a good time to look back at the past 12 months and highlight some of the great new features we’ve seen added in N-central. I got the idea for this blog recently when I was helping a partner and was shocked to find discover how old the version they were running was. Of course, I get that not everyone wants to jump onto the latest release straight away.

Scrum metrics are an essential indicator of your team’s progress. In an agile team, they help you understand the pace and progress of every sprint, ascertain whether you’re on track for timely delivery or not, and more. Although scrum metrics are essential, they are only one facet of the delivery process — sure, they ensure you’re on track, but how do you ensure that there are no roadblocks during development? That’s precisely where observability helps.

The DevOps pipeline is a crucial part of software development, but it can often get mired in bottlenecks. Most problems are caused by the development and operations teams having different responsibilities are due to inefficiencies in the pipeline design. However, thanks to continuous observability, DevOps now gets a new lease of life since it is possible to tweak the pipeline to suit the developer’s workflow.