Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

An overview of key .NET 6 features

.NET 6 is finally here, giving us a new long term stable version of.NET Core. .NET 6 succeeds.NET 5, which was generally seen as a “skip version” by most of us, getting limited use compared to.NET Core 3.1. With this release, we get updates to both the runtime and the C# language. In this post, we’re taking a closer look at what we see as three of the most useful.NET 6 features.

How to improve your influence as an SRE

Improving your influence over the company will help you deliver high quality work as your goals will be closely aligned with those of the company. In this blog piece, Ricardo has explained how to improve your influence as an SRE. Balancing fast-paced business requirements with the demands of keeping production services stable is not an easy task.

Features, the forgotten feature of Puppet

When you write enough Puppet code, you will eventually find yourself in need of a Facter fact or Puppet resource type that doesn’t exist in Puppet itself. Then, if you’re like me, you go to the Puppet Forge and see if someone else has written what you need. Oftentimes, you find what you need, add a new module to your Puppetfile or module metadata, and move on with your life.

Synthetic Testing and Real User Monitoring

Synthetic Testing and Real User Monitoring are the most important tools in your performance toolbox. But they do different things and are useful at different times and many developers only spend time mastering one of these tools and only see a part of their performance problems, like trying to hammer in a screw. Let’s look at these tools, what they measure, and when to use them.

Loki 2.4 is easier to run with a new simplified deployment model

Loki 2.4 is here! It comes with a very long list of cool new features, but there are a couple things I really want to focus on here. Be sure to check out the full release notes and of course the upgrade guide to get all the latest info about upgrading Loki. Also check out our ObservabilityCON 2021 session Why Loki is easier to use and operate than ever before.

Grafana Tempo 1.2 released: New features make monitoring traces 2x more efficient

Grafana Tempo 1.2 has been released! Among other things, we are proud to present both our first version to support search and the most performant version of Tempo ever released. There are also some minor breaking changes so make sure to check those out below. If you want ALL the details you can always check out the v1.2 changelog, but if that’s too much, this post will cover all the big ticket items.

Playbooks in Action: Creating Effective, Repeatable Incident Resolution Workflows

While service incidents can be wildly dissimilar, they tend to have one thing in common: a need for quick resolution. Response teams need a robust, repeatable process to follow that ensures fast, mistake-free execution, especially for those 4 AM calls. Having a documented checklist saved where the entire team can access and use it at any time could make the difference between quick resolution or compounding the problem.

Enabling SRE best practices: new contextual traces in Cloud Logging

The need for relevant and contextual telemetry data to support online services has grown in the last decade as businesses undergo digital transformation. These data are typically the difference between proactively remediating application performance issues or costly service downtime. Distributed tracing is a key capability for improving application performance and reliability, as noted in SRE best practices.