Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Whether you’re an e-commerce company, a SaaS provider, or a content publisher, understanding the performance of your website is important to everyone on the team—not just the developers. Performance is a huge part of the user experience and directly tied to how well your website achieves its goals. But web performance is often measured in very technical terms, like Largest Contentful Paint, that cause most business folk’s eyes to glaze over.

Recent, high-profile cybersecurity exploits, such as Sun Burst and Log4j, demonstrate that every enterprise is only a stone’s throw from a software vulnerability. This becomes especially critical when security is breached in a network monitoring component that has privileged access to core enterprise systems. In the case of Sun Burst, a well-known monitoring software provider made international headlines.

Last week (7th September 2022) I spotted a post from EUC and Cloud Veteran Marius Sandu alerting his professional and social media networks to an outage of Azure Front Door that in turn meant a significant number of Azure services and resources were unavailable.

A goal of open-source observability is unifying several different signals to provide the observability everyone wants. It’s always interesting to speak to people on this journey, and how they try to provide it through open-source projects, and the challenges they can face. I was thrilled to host Pranay Prateek on the most recent episode of the OpenObservability Talks podcast.

Have you ever tried to find a bug in a multi-layered architecture? Although this might sound like a simple enough task, it can quickly become a nightmare if the system doesn’t have proper monitoring. And the more distributed your system is, the more complex it becomes to analyze the root cause of a problem. That’s precisely why observability is key in distributed systems. Observability can be thought of as the advanced version of application monitoring.

I have been implementing a couple of features lately that allow users to download files. During this process, I have visited various namespaces and possibilities with ASP.NET Core. In an attempt not to forget what I have learned and in the hope that this knowledge can be used by others, here is a blog post about downloading files from ASP.NET Core 😊 This post will use an ASP.NET Core MVC application as an example since that is what I am using.

Just about every organization today relies on key applications running on complex multi-cloud environments to transact business and enable users to work. It is critical to ensure that those applications are running optimally. A solid monitoring and alerting system is required to know when an issue needs attention. But having a robust monitoring system is not enough.

A reliable digital customer experience is critical to the success of digital-first businesses. Each minute of downtime can result in the loss of revenue, unsatisfied customers, and damage to reputation. However, as your uptime gets closer to 100%, it gets exponentially harder to improve and often comes at the cost of speed of innovation. A good balance between innovation (i.e., new feature releases) and maintaining an acceptable level of reliability is key to success in the digital world.

Almost every organization is going through digital transformation. According to IDC, direct digital transformation investment is growing globally at a compound annual growth rate of 15.5% and is expected to approach $6.8 trillion by 2023. Customers quickly embrace the benefits of a customer experience reshaped by technology. However, they have little patience when that technology doesn’t work as expected.

Monitoring the digital experience of users is a must-have these days. Ensuring the end clients are satisfied is difficult though. People are not keen to provide feedback; they just change the vendor without explanation. It is, therefore, crucial to build enough observability into a front-end application (a web page or a mobile UI) so it can tell the story of how well the user perceived the interaction within the application.