Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

New Ops Guide: Best Practices for On-Call Teams

The always-on, always-available expectations of digital services have increased the requirements of technical teams to be ready and provide response around the clock. For teams new to this concept, introducing on-call can be stressful and complex. As part of PagerDuty’s main platform, on-call management is key to our business, but the non-technical aspects are also important for teams to consider.

Elastic 7.11 released: General availability of searchable snapshots and the new cold tier, and the beta of schema on read

We are pleased to announce the general availability (GA) of Elastic 7.11. This release brings a broad set of new capabilities to our Elastic Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security solutions, which are built into the Elastic Stack — Elasticsearch and Kibana. This release enables customers to optimize for cost, performance, insight, and flexibility with the general availability of searchable snapshots and the beta of schema on read.

Elastic Stack alerting now generally available

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of alerting in the Elastic Stack with the release of 7.11. With deep integrations throughout our products and solutions, a laser focus on distinguishing signal from noise, and tie-ins to the third-party platforms you depend on like email, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Teams, building, using, and acting on alerts in Elastic has never been more powerful.

Introducing the Elastic App Search web crawler

In Elastic Enterprise Search 7.11, we’re thrilled to announce the beta launch of Elastic App Search web crawler, a simple yet powerful way to ingest publicly available web content so it becomes instantly searchable on your website. Making content on these websites searchable can take several forms. Elastic App Search already lets users ingest content via JSON uploading, JSON pasting, and through API endpoints.

Getting started with runtime fields, Elastic's implementation of schema on read

Historically, Elasticsearch has relied on a schema on write approach to make searching data fast. We are now adding schema on read capabilities to Elasticsearch so that users have the flexibility to alter a document's schema after ingest and also generate fields that exist only as part of the search query. Together, schema on read and schema on write provides users with the choice to balance performance and flexibility based on their needs.

Runtime fields: Schema on read for Elastic

In 7.11, we’re excited to announce support for schema on read in the Elastic Stack. We now offer the best of both worlds on a single platform — the performance and scale of the existing schema on write mechanism that our users love and depend on, coupled with a new level of flexibility for defining and executing queries with schema on read. We call our implementation of schema on read runtime fields.

Streamlining IT Operations with BigPanda and ServiceNow

Does the following sound familiar? You have a complex, hybrid and dynamic IT stack – with your cloud infrastructure changing by the minute and your container infrastructure changing by the second. Your monitoring and observability tools provide excellent visibility into your infrastructure, your applications and your services, but the dynamic environment in which they operate causes them to generate large volumes of heterogeneous machine data, with thousands of alerts a minute.

Why CSPs Need to Shift Focus to Service Experience Monitoring

The past twelve months have pushed many communication service providers (CSPs) to the limit. According to financial reports of the last six months, the New Normal brought about by the pandemic has significantly increased network expansion efforts, IoT connections, new broadband customers, and out of bundle voice traffic and mobile data.

How to Improve Your Building Management System

A building management system (BMS) lets your business monitor and control mechanical and electrical equipment across one or more buildings. Heating, cooling, and ventilation (HVAC), security, and other systems linked to a BMS usually represent 70% of a building’s energy usage. So, proper configuration of your BMS is key — otherwise, a poorly configured system can negatively impact your building’s efficiency, maintenance, security, and safety.

How I Manage Credentials in Python Using AWS Secrets Manager

A platform-agnostic way of accessing credentials in Python. Even though AWS enables fine-grained access control via IAM roles, sometimes in our scripts we need to use credentials to external resources, not related to AWS, such as API keys, database credentials, or passwords of any kind. There are a myriad of ways of handling such sensitive data. In this article, I’ll show you an incredibly simple and effective way to manage that using AWS and Python.