Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ask anyone who’s managing any cloud environment of any size, and they will undoubtedly bring up the stress they experience on a regular basis over tags. Since the dawn of cloud, every cloud user has struggled with the challenge of tagging — essentially the only mechanism that exists for you to apply metadata to your cloud environment. The fact that tags themselves are an imperfect tool — both inflexible and hard to manage — makes no difference.

Load balancing is a significant part of every internet-facing software, and with Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), AWS offers a set of load balancers for every use case. Since our latest update, Dashbird also gives you insights into these ELB services; let’s look at them and see how they can be used in a serverless environment.

You know that observability plays a crucial role in helping to manage today’s distributed, cloud-native, microservices-based applications. But you may be surprised to learn that – despite its close association with modern applications – observability as a concept was born more than a half-century ago. Its origins stretch all the way back to the late 1950s, long before anyone was talking about microservices and the cloud.

This is the fifth and final part of this FinOps series, The Operate Phase. If you have missed any of my previous blogs, here is a list of posts in the series: Note: I am ex-AWS, so you will notice a lot more focus on AWS tools and services as examples here, however we are cloud agnostic and all cloud providers have similar services and tools.

Do you know what your power density per rack is? How about what it costs to power each individual rack for a year? Or all your racks combined? The fact is that most data center managers don’t know this information, which can be incredibly valuable when it comes to power capacity planning, energy management, and maximizing the utilization of existing resources. That’s why we created a simple and free tool to make it easy for you to understand your power density and data center energy costs.

For decades, scientists and tech visionaries have envisioned a day when computers become so powerful that they become smarter than the human race. There is no shortage of science fiction stories and movies about robot uprisings. We are very far from that scary scenario, but at the same time artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer sci-fi. Many applications of AI abound today in business, and it is even being used in creative professions.

Will your software perform well during peak hours? Can it handle the load during sales periods? Is your infrastructure valid if you double your sales by the end of the year? These are just some of the questions that scalability testing can help you answer. Scalability testing evaluates the activity level of your application by upscaling and downscaling the number of users.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measurable metrics that track a company’s performance against its key business objectives. And they are important for a variety of reasons.

One of the great features of the InfluxData cloud platform is that it comes out of the box with all the tools you need to quickly read and write your data to the database. Here, we’ll walk through creating data visualizations with InfluxDB and plotly.js, a JavaScript graphing library built on top of d3.js and stack.gl.

On January 25, 2022, Qualys announced the discovery of a local privilege escalation vulnerability that it identified as PwnKit. The PwnKit vulnerability affects PolicyKit’s pkexec, a SUID-root program installed by default on many Linux distributions. The same day of the announcement, a proof of concept (PoC) exploit was built and published by the security research community.