Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Cloud computing can be more complex than anticipated, particularly as agencies continue to move applications and operations into a cloud environment. Does your federal IT team have the in-house skills to ensure cloud computing is helping your agency rather than draining its money and resources?

In today’s Tip of the Day, we are looking at validating the performance of your CDN cache vs. the CDN origin content. Having this information at your fingertips will allow you to verify that (i) your CDN service is improving performance for your end users; and (ii) they are adhering to your SLAs. Your CDN Monitoring solution needs to offer a comprehensive set of insights into regional performance problems, network routing challenges, and other overall performance issues, including origin vs.

Agile is a popular buzzword in software development, with some organizations and teams masquerading as “agile” while they are actually doing something very different. I’ve seen it numerous times in my career as an Agile Coach: A leader claims to embrace agile values, but micromanages engineering teams and uses agility as a way to manipulate developers to work long hours. The result?

In the world of containers and Kubernetes, observability is crucial. Cluster administrators need visibility into the infrastructure and cluster operators need to know the status of their workloads at any given time. And in both cases, they need observability into moving objects. This is where Metricbeat and its autodiscover feature do the hard part for you.

An on-site switch plays a critical role in a network: that of connecting your users to the rest of the IT infrastructure. Don’t think of that jack in the wall or under the cubicle as a simple Ethernet port. As part of effective switch management, you need to think of it as the mission-critical gateway to IT services that it is.

Puppet is a Continuous Configuration Automation tool that’s you can use to automate the configuration of your entire infrastructure. You can use it to manage the configuration of anywhere from a few, to thousands of servers or devices. Puppet consists of two main components: The Puppet Server The Puppet server is where you create and store your configurations and define which nodes specific configurations will be applied to.

Isn’t all logging pretty much the same? Logs appear by default, like magic, without any further intervention by teams other than simply starting a system… right?

Being in the DevOps space, we're often asked questions about software deployment like, "What's the difference between continuous deployment and continuous delivery?", "What is continuous deployment?", and "Are continuous deployment and continuous delivery the same thing?" So first, let's start by clearly defining these terms.

When is it time to say goodbye? For a hardware device, that question can be tough to answer. Though the device has been in the environment for several years, there is still usable life left. So why would we retire and dispose the device and spend additional money on a replacement? With the device’s lifecycle information, that answer becomes much clearer.

Military strategists will often tell you that the best way to win a conflict is to prevent it by projecting an unmistakable posture of strength, preparedness and resolve. As history has shown in the seven decades since the Second World War, deterrence doesn’t come cheap, certainly not in the era of modern, technology-enabled warfare. Yet it is still far less costly in lives, dollars, and equipment than letting a hostile situation escalate out of hand.