Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I’ve been in the SQL Server space for a long time—my entire career, in fact—but it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m great at what I do; it merely means I’ve seen a lot. I’ve watched things go well and have experienced my fair share of spectacular failures, too. Earlier in my career, I stayed around too long in environments where things weren’t going great.

While conventional remote IT assistance software is super efficient for instant IT support, it can also come with data privacy and security concerns. So how do you create a balance between providing effective tech support and maintaining privacy and security? If you have customers in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, surveillance security, or industries that involve personal data or information this is an even more crucial question.

When you think about improving visibility into your IT environment, monitoring applications and the other infrastructure that hosts them might be the first thing that may come to your mind. Although infrastructure and application monitoring are two important components of an overall monitoring strategy, an equally vital part – and one that is easier to overlook – is network monitoring. If your network fails or underperforms, your applications will also experience problems.

According to results from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022, nearly half (46%) of respondents say they use MySQL, making it the most widely-adopted database technology among developers today. This popularity is due in no small part to MySQL’s unique features that help it handily meet the needs of modern applications, from small software projects to business-critical systems.

Amazon CloudWatch provides Log Insights, a feature that can help you: CloudWatch Log Insights uses a proprietary query language with several basic commands. It provides sample queries for common AWS service log types, as well as query auto-completion. Learn more about CloudWatch Log Insights capabilities and how to use them.

I used the first two parts of this series to lay out my case for how and why cloud-based networks can effectively “Trojan horse” costs into your networking spend and highlighted some real-world instances I’ve come across in my career. In the third and final installment of this series, I want to focus on ways you can optimize your personnel and cloud infrastructures to prevent or offset some of these novel costs.

Tech companies are gradually adopting the modern CI/CD flow that facilitates rapid releases and fast collaboration between team members. Traditional staging environments are being replaced with ephemeral environments because the shared staging environments do not support the culture of fast-release cycles mentioned earlier. As the traditional staging or testing environments are shared, one developer’s feature can cause bugs, making the whole environment unusable.