The growing complexity of today’s IT reality is indisputable: Software is becoming more and more complex, and the infrastructure it runs on is equally so. This complexity comes, in part, from adding layers upon layers to the infrastructure we manage — from bare metal servers to VMs to containers to function-based computing — and from how quickly we cycle in new technologies and how slowly old technologies are cycled out.
The community came together on September 9-10, 2019 for Sensu Summit for two excellent days of talks, workshops, and a touch of high school nostalgia (Revolution Hall used to be a school, after all) — starting with nerd-approved Pee Chee folders and customized number 2 pencils, and an actual high school drumline closing out the event.
Ansible is a powerful configuration management tool for deploying software and administering remote systems that you can integrate into any existing architecture. It relies on industry-standard security mechanisms and takes full advantage of existing operating system utilities.
DevOps has been a hot topic for many years, but it's still common for organizations to feel overwhelmed by the complexity of automating their entire infrastructure and to get hung up on which tools to use. An integrated set of DevOps tools for monitoring has the power to improve visibility and productivity, achieve higher-performing systems, and establish cross-functional collaboration.
In part one of this series, I recapped a good bit of the fireside chat with Kelsey Hightower, Caleb Hailey, and Sean Porter at Sensu Summit 2018. They discussed the evolution of monitoring tools and related DevOps technologies, and how to incorporate new tools into both modern and legacy infrastructure.
It's no secret that the popularity of running containerized applications has exploded over the past several years. Being able to iterate and release an application by provisioning its dependencies through code is a big win. According to Gartner, “More than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production” by 2022.
At Sensu Summit 2018, Sensu CEO Caleb Hailey and CTO Sean Porter sat down with Kelsey Hightower, Staff Developer Advocate at Google Cloud Platform (GCP), for a fireside chat on a variety of topics, including the evolution of the monitoring space, Kubernetes best practices, their opinions on an open core business model, how operators’ jobs are changing, and more. Kelsey, Sean, and Caleb discussing all things Kubernetes and open source at Sensu Summit 2018
One of my earliest jobs was as an admin for an MSP. We'd routinely generate alerts that weren't actionable, lacked context, and for most of our customers, were considered noise. From a monitoring perspective, it was bad. Customers didn't trust in the alerts they received and often resorted to having some additional monitoring product installed on their systems. It's safe to say that our auto-generated tickets and emails were largely ignored.
At this point in our series, you’re likely quite familiar with the many opportunities and challenges that Kubernetes presents (especially when it comes to monitoring!). The last couple of posts take at a look at Prometheus for monitoring Kubernetes, with a side-by-side comparison with Sensu, and illustrate how they work in tandem.
At Monitorama 2018, Engineering Manager Kale Stedman shared Demonware’s journey to assisted remediation, or as he likes to call it: “How my team nearly built an auto-remediation system before we realized we never actually wanted one in the first place.” In this post, I’ll recap Kale’s Monitorama talk, highlighting the key decisions that helped his team reduce daily alerts, fix underlying problems, and establish a more engaged Monitoring Team — including the steps the
