Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

An Introduction to OpenTelemetry

The growth of technology has led to more efficient and relevant digital experiences, and customers continue to expect more out of those interactions. That’s true no matter their location and no matter which device they choose to use. Companies that cannot provide these kinds of personalized interactions for their customers find themselves falling behind the competition as technology continues to advance.

Do you reward your staff for doing a great job? The Top MSPs do

One of the top Elite partners I enjoy working with is an MSP based out of White Salmon, Washington called Radcomp. Over the years, I’ve worked closely with their manager of operations, Tyrell Midland. We’ve had all sorts of candid conversations in that time, but one we had last week I thought would make a great blog post.

Announcing Istio integration

Adoption of service meshes like Istio is increasing. As a result, Speedscale has developed a webassembly plugin. We extended Envoy using Rust, and no changes are required to your Istio configuration. This allows us to leverage the same sidecars that you have deployed throughout your environment to inspect API traffic. Once we are listening through Istio, the typical Speedscale magic can take place. We can use the data to build integration/performance test suites and autogenerate service mocks.

Monitoring and Improving Employee Experience In Virtual Desktop (DaaS/VDI) Environments (Part 1)

A common pain point we repeatedly hear from our customers that use Desktop as a Service (DaaS)/Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments is, “We have monitoring in place for physical hosts and infrastructure, but our employees still complain a lot.” If DaaS or VDI is part of your IT environment and you lack visibility into such environments to ensure effective employee experience, read on.

How Slack Transformed Their CI With Tracing

Slack experienced meteoric growth between 2017 and 2020—but that level of growth came with growing pains. In his talk at the 2021 o11ycon+hnycon, Frank Chen (LinkedIn), a Slack Senior Staff Engineer, detailed one of Slack’s biggest pain points in that period: flaky tests. A flaky test returns both a passing and failing result despite no changes in the code. At one point, between 2017 and 2020, Slack’s flaky test rate reached as high as 50%.

Practical CPU time performance tuning for security software: Part 2

In a previous blog, we discussed how to monitor, troubleshoot, and fix high %CPU issues. We also revealed a system API that could have an unexpected impact on CPU consumption. In this episode, we’ll discuss another time-related performance aspect that is unique to security software: application startup time. You don’t need to be a developer to benefit from this article.

Debugging with Dashbird: AWS Lambda Process Exited Before Completing Request

Another generic error message from our favorite FaaS provider AWS Lambda. And again, there are multiple reasons why this issue could arise. Let’s first look at the basics of AWS Lambda to get a better intuition for when things go wrong later. Lambda is an asynchronous event-based service at heart.

Why Serverless Apps Fail and How to Design Resilient Architectures?

We’ve been monitoring 100,000’s of serverless backend components for 3+ years at Dashbird. In our experience, Serverless infrastructure failures boil down to: These isolated faults become causes of failure due to dependencies in our cloud architectures (ref. Difference of Fault vs. Failure). If a serverless Lambda function relies on a database that is under stress, the entire API may start returning 5XX errors.

Implementing an Internal Developer Platform

In a previous post, we discussed what an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is and some drivers behind IDP initiatives. If we go through our interactions with different organizations, we see teams embarking on the journey to build their IDPs mainly driven by the following requirements: While building an IDP may seem like an obvious choice and initiative, it is definitely not an easy task to accomplish. Building an IDP involves dealing with many moving components.

Four Industries That Will Be Disrupted by AI in 2021

With the never-ending potential of technology to disrupt everyday processes, more and more industries are deciding to adapt to one exciting area of innovation today: artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, Global Industry Analysts Inc. predicts that AI will be worth 164.03 billion GBP by 2026, and here, we look at four industries set to be disrupted by AI. Since the healthcare sector collects and greatly depends on personal data from their patients, AI will play a crucial role in data management.