Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

You’ve probably heard before that the best thing to do with your extra money is to invest. And the stock market was built so that any average person could do just that. In fact, the New York Stock Exchange was originally just a group of merchants who met in person daily to buy and sell stocks and bonds. Over time, however, regulations were put in place that limited the type of people allowed to take part in the financial markets.

In the first of this two-part series, we covered how to set up AppSignal in a Ruby on Rails application for many great insights out of the box. AppSignal can automatically track errors, monitor performance, and report metrics about some dependencies. But, in many cases, each of our applications behaves in different ways, so we'll want more than just generic monitoring. In this post, we will run through adding custom instrumentation and monitoring to a Ruby on Rails application.

Monitoring is a critical part of managing a WordPress site since you need to know what's going on with it, such as how many visitors it has, how quickly it loads, and whether it's constantly online. Data on these areas will aid you in making critical decisions, resulting in improved performance, happier visitors, and, if applicable, a higher bottom line. Many factors can cause WordPress to slow down, but you don't need to be a techie to address them.

An email recently came to our team (the Redgate Advocates) asking us what we thought the key challenges for data professionals might be in 2022. Kathi Kellenberger, Steve Jones and I each answered independently. We all bring different experiences and thoughts to the table, yet we all came up with three common themes. Here is what we all feel is likely to be of the most importance this year.

Today’s organizations are managing increasingly complex IT ecosystems and pressured to deliver on innovation—all while trying to maintain service performance and reliability to keep up with the always-on digital economy. With IT complexity growing exponentially, incidents have become a common, if not day-to-day struggle for many businesses. Incident management is the process or method that modern organizations use to prepare for and respond to service disruptions.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employers are losing more than four million workers every single month. That, coupled with the record number of 11 million open jobs, has left businesses across the board scrambling to crack the code and find a way to not only attract top talent – but, more importantly – keep them from jumping ship at the next best opportunity.

One of the common challenges when doing performance testing is the difficulty of correlating the metrics of your application with your testing results. Having available QA, infrastructure, and application metrics together allows engineering teams to better understand the behavior of their systems during the testing, helping to detect and prevent potential issues in their applications.

Many of the multi-faceted applications development teams deploy every day are loosely coupled and every service exists to power another service. Most teams developing fullstack applications know that testing the communication between these services essential. Part of the process is testing HTTP request endpoints, and this tutorial focuses on exactly that. I will lead you through learning how to extend the k6 framework to test our HTTP endpoints.

I don’t usually do blog posts on news stories, but this one has the potential to impact a lot of people, so I thought it was worth taking a closer look. The top-level story is that Microsoft announced it will not be releasing Hyper-V Server Free as part of Windows 2022. However, if you’re already using Hyper-V Server Free 2019, you can continue to do so until 2029. Hyper-V Server Free is basically a Windows Server Core on which Microsoft has pre-installed the Hyper-V role.