Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

OnCallogy Sessions

Being on call is challenging. It’s signing up to be operating complex services in a totally interruptible manner, at all hours of the day or night, with limited context. It’s therefore critical to have proper on-call on-boarding procedures, offer continuous training sessions, and continuously improve documentation. We also need to make sure people feel safe by providing ways to reduce their stress, and make room for questions to surface all sorts of uncertainties around our operations.

OpenTelemetry Collector - What Is It?

Before we dive into the Collector, let’s cover the components that make up the OpenTelemetry project. If you missed it, our post What is OpenTelemetry gives a high level introduction to OpenTelemetry and the key components of OpenTelemetry project: The OpenTelemetry collector is optional when using a SaaS service like Scout. Even so, knowing what the Collector can do and when to use it is helpful to understand.

How to Build Unified Cross-Functional Teams in Today's Hybrid IT Landscape

Data continues to be a major driver of business operations, and as a result, it’s becoming more common to see cross-functional teams working within IT. In 2022, for example, data-related projects enforcing data hygiene, data integrity, or data security continue to lead most functional leaders’ investments.

Be Proactive Amid Growing Cyber Security Concerns

Over the past few weeks, we’ve all been paying very close attention to the events unfolding in eastern Europe. As an individual, it’s heartbreaking to see a war break out and the impact it’s having across the region. We know that cyberattacks are now a part of war. We also know cyberattacks can be targeted, but also have the potential for unintended consequences and increased impact as they can spread outside of the initial target.

How Privacy Organizations and NGOs Help Build a Better Society

When we think of NGOs we usually think of organizations that take action regarding children, diseases, education, or poverty, but most of the time we don't think of privacy. In fact, there are tons of non-governmental organizations working hard to protect everyone's basic right to privacy. Many people are out there right now dedicating their daily lives to safeguarding our freedom and privacy in the digital era. Supporting them is more important than you can imagine.

Civo Update - April 2022

In March, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) released its Annual Survey 2021. Civo featured alongside the likes of Amazon and Azure when CNCF asked developers "Does your organization use any certified Kubernetes installers?". Saiyam, Director of Technical Evangelism at Civo, also released an update on the new advancements so far for our 2022 Roadmap.

How-To Obtain Cloud Pricing at Scale

In 2020, we started an internal project to price our data center systems to understand what they might cost to run in the AWS or Azure cloud environments. We initially used some of the online pricing tools available from these vendors, but they were slow and difficult to use in bulk. You can find the public cloud tools here: AWS and Azure. We were forced to add individual systems one at a time and pick options for each because of the nature of these tools.

DevOps 101: How do you get buy-in from people?

In the first part of my DevOps 101 series, we tackled the fundamentals of What, who why and how. In this follow-up, I’m going to focus on how to gain buy-in across your organization. That said, who do you need buy-in from? DevOps is the union of people, processes and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users, according to Microsoft’s Donovan Brown. That’s a good explanation, because the focus is not on tooling, or processes, or even just people.

Logic App Best practices, Tips and Tricks: #8 Expressions nightmare

Welcome once again to another Logic App Best practices, Tips, and Tricks. In my previous blog posts, I talked about some of the most essential best practices you should have while working with the Azure Logic App: And some tips and tricks: Today I’m going to speak about in my opinion one of the most annoying features/tasks and recommend some Best practices, Tips, and Tricks to minimize it: working with expressions.

How to Build a RACI Matrix for ITIL

Management is also often about accountability. Well, let’s scratch that, it’s always about accountability. And when it comes to IT Service Management (ITSM), that accountability goes double, because we’re dealing with processes that cover your entire organizational structure. That’s when the RACI matrix comes in, an acronym that’s so fundamental that it’s covered by the ITIL Foundation Exam. Today, we’ll learn all about it, and why it can help with service design.