Black Friday. Everyone's throwing out coupon codes with crazy discounts, right? Why on earth would we be doubling our price for just that day? For many online services, Black Friday is a huge source of income. Webshops reportedly double or even triple their revenue that day. Many make up for a bad month in just that single day. On your most important sales day of the year, you want your site to be online. Therefore, on that day, our service is twice as valuable.

Whether it’s a scheduled maintenance or an unexpected outage, downtime is time your solutions are out of action and unavailable for use. Long or frequent periods of downtime have significant costs to the company, and ultimately undermine customer trust. So what is MTTR? And how can improving MTTR reduce downtime? Below are four key metrics to get you started.

Exoprise recently added support for OAuth (OAuth 2.0 to be exact) credentials to the core Exchange Online testing sensor. This capability has been requested in the past and with this new release, enables end-to-end testing of Exchange Online and the OAuth capabilities of Azure AD with Office 365 from multiple concurrent locations.

DevOps is a culture where full development team works together to complete software development and delivery to production. It is a practice that enables organizations to optimize speed and efficiency across IT functions.

Last week, AWS announced a fantastic new feature for AWS CloudFormation, CloudFormation Drift Detection. Drift detection allows you to determine whether the AWS resources controlled by your CloudFormation stacks have drifted from their original configuration. This can happen if you manually adjust properties of your AWS resources. Today, we’re excited to announce a new action to report on your CloudFormation drifted stacks: CloudFormation Stack Drift Report.

There are specific cases that require a greater level of control and detail in scheduling tasks. Of course this is possible with Java’s TimerTask, but the work would be a bit more arduous and perhaps even unnecessary since we already have APIs ready for such a task, as is the case with the Quartz Scheduler.

To make serverless architectures more observable, we’re excited to introduce the new Cloud Functions view in Datadog. You can now search, filter, and explore all your AWS Lambda functions in one central view, and dive straight into detailed performance data that is scoped to a single function. The Cloud Functions view brings together Lambda metrics and logs with distributed request traces from your functions, which are now available in Datadog thanks to our new integration with AWS X-Ray.

Datadog is pleased to announce the upcoming availability of Synthetics, a whole new layer of visibility on the Datadog platform. By monitoring your applications and API endpoints via simulated user requests, Synthetics helps you ensure uptime, identify regional issues, and track application performance. By unifying Synthetics with your metrics, traces, and logs, Datadog allows you to observe how all your systems are performing as experienced by your users.

Today we released our new open source package called nova-ohdear-tool. It's meant to be installed into a Laravel Nova app. Laravel Nova is a package that allows you to easily create admin panels for Laravel applications. You'll find the installation instructions in the documentation section of Oh Dear!.