Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Ever known a project manager who thinks a task takes minutes when it really takes hours? One company has developed a helpful monitoring tool that not only helps project managers make more realistic estimates, but also helps product teams save time, increase efficiency, and improve their overall performance. At ObservabilityCON 2020, Walter Ritzel Paixão Côrtes, a product designer at Dell, gave a presentation about a data-driven solution his team developed called Product Team Observability.

From navigating the latest big announcements from Microsoft to finding ways to attract top technicians and avoid "the great resignation," find out what topics and tips MSPs gravitated toward most.

It’s an exciting time here at Kentik. We’re expanding into new markets, working closely with amazing customers, and continuing to hire talented people to grow our team. We announced a new round of funding in the fall. We’re continuously building on our product. And we have our sights set on scaling our systems to large numbers. As Kentik’s backend engineering manager, I know this has kept our team very busy.

If you have access to the internet, it’s likely that you have already heard of the critical vulnerability in the Log4j library. A zero-day vulnerability in the Java library Log4j, with the assigned CVE code of CVE-2021-44228, has been disclosed by Chen Zhaojun, a security researcher in the Alibaba Cloud Security team. It’s got people worried—and with good reason.

At many organizations, the surprise discovery that the widely used Apache log4j open source software has harbored a longtime critical vulnerability was as if Scrooge and the Grinch had teamed up for the biggest holiday heist of all. Incident response teams across the globe have scrambled to remediate thousands, if not millions of applications. “For cybercriminals this is Christmas come early,” explained Theresa Payton, former White House CIO and current CEO of Fortalice Solutions.

The following is an analysis of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) incident on 12/22/2021. When it comes to major AWS outages, three times is certainly not the charm. For the third time in three weeks, the public cloud giant reported an outage, this time due to a power outage “within a single data center within a single Availability Zone (USE1-AZ4) in the U.S.-EAST-1 Region," according to the AWS status page. Here at Catchpoint, we first observed issues at 07:11 a.m.

Ooh, good question! My favorite thing about this part of the year is that work slows down, everybody is on vacation, and those of us not traveling get to work on little projects that we’re too busy to touch most of the year. As Martin Thwaites put it: “The Product Owners are away, the devs will play.” For Martin, this year, “play” means adding tracing to more of their services.

You place your mug on your desk and boot your computer. Like every morning, you skim over various dashboards on one screen and sift through your email alerts on the other before you start pulling the regular reports. But this morning turns out to be nothing like other mornings. It is about to take a mean twist that will keep you from ever finishing your morning coffee.

Looking at where major DevOps trends are headed, a common theme across many tools and practices is improving the Developer Experience or DX. One paradigm of thinking is that if you improve your internal customer experience, then your external customers will benefit too. However, up until now, the Developer Experience has been quite siloed and segregated for a multitude of reasons, such as scaling or having best-of-breed technologies to support individual concerns. Presentation on DX.

If you’re looking for an alternative to Docker Desktop or to integrate Docker into your Multipass workflow, this how-to is for you. Multipass can host a docker engine inside an Ubuntu VM in a manner similar to Docker Desktop. That Docker instance can be controlled either directly from the VM, or remotely from the host machine with no additional software required. This allows you to run Docker locally on your Windows or Mac machine directly from your host terminal.