Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

With the Kafka Summit fast approaching, I thought it was time to get my hands dirty and see what it’s all about. As an advocate for IoT, I heard about Kafka but was too embedded in protocols like MQTT to investigate further. For the uninitiated (like me) both protocols seem extremely similar if not almost competing. However, I have learned this is far from the case and actually, in many cases, they complement one another.

Organisations in the banking, insurance, and financial services sectors have been slower than others in moving to the cloud due to concerns over security, data residency, and privacy. For more traditional financial institutions, there is also the not insignificant consideration that their core banking systems are running on decades old on-prem architecture that is just not possible to shift to the public cloud. Nevertheless, adoption of the cloud in banking and finance is happening.

Quite often it has been seen that employees do not find their assets at the location where they left them. These types of scenarios are extremely dangerous for business as they can be harmful to your business by decreasing the productivity of the organization and employees' productivity as well. How? When employees do not find the required asset, they spend their time looking for assets. Even after spending a lot of time looking for assets, employees do not find them.

DevOps: Development and Operations joined together in perfect harmony, one feeding the other and vice-versa. That's the dream. But it's easy for the link between the two to be broken. 'Dev' stops talking to 'Ops,' or Ops falls out with Dev, often because of a lack of understanding of each other's goals. That's where Monitoring and Observability come in. They're like the mediators whose job is to make sure the two main players in DevOps keep that metaphorical dialogue open.

We hear a lot of questions from folks taking their first steps into website monitoring about how the service works and what we offer. One of the more frequently asked questions is why they need us at all. After all, they have metrics from XYZ provider who can tell them if they have consumed too much bandwidth or are overloaded with traffic. Wouldn’t they just know that they were up or down by watching those metrics?

OpenTelemetry has been getting a lot of attention in the observability field. Moreover, in StackState’s latest release, we added support for OpenTelemetry traces. Melcom van Eeden, software developer at StackState, was one of our developer champions who made this possible. In addition to joining us on this episode of StackPod, he wrote a blog post on how to leverage OpenTelemetry with StackState and he recorded a tutorial video about the topic.

At SolarWinds, our purpose is to enrich the lives of the people we serve. In a world where complexity is expanding, our commitment to offer simple yet powerful IT solutions has served us well throughout our more than 20-year history. Today’s pace of digital transformation means businesses are actively building new applications and leveraging multi-cloud deployments, while reworking their existing ones, to achieve operational excellence.

Today marks a significant milestone for SolarWinds, as we’ve formally announced our organizational direction to evolve from our leadership position in monitoring to become a leader in observability. Today is also significant because it marks the official release of our Hybrid Cloud Observability, and I’m excited to share more details on what we believe expands the scope of observability for the market.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that makes it easy for you to deploy, manage and scale containerized applications. Although ECS is a managed service and hides many complexities under the hood, there have been many cases where startups have not been able to take full advantage of ECS due to slow deployments. In this article, we will share some tips to improve deployment speed on ECS. We will try to cover both EC2 tasks and Fargate tasks.

The latest Kubernetes release, 1.24, is about to be made generally available. Today, the community announced the availability of the 1.24 release candidate. Developers, DevOps and other cloud and open source enthusiasts who want to experiment with the latest cutting edge K8s features can already do so easily with MicroK8s.