Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Just after midnight on October 1, 2023, the remote island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic began passing internet traffic over its long-awaited, first-ever submarine cable connection. In this blog post, we cover how Kentik’s measurements captured this historic activation, as well as the epic story of the advocacy work it took to make this development possible.

Understanding production has historically been reserved for software developers and engineers. After all, those folks are the ones building, maintaining, and fixing everything they deliver into production. However, the value of software doesn't stop the moment it makes it to production. Software systems have users, and there are often teams dedicated to their support.

This article was originally published on The New Stack and is reposted here with permission. By taking advantage of monitoring data, companies can ensure their infrastructure is performing optimally while reducing costs. While building new features and launching new products is fun, none of it matters if your software isn’t reliable. One key part of making sure your apps run smoothly is having robust infrastructure monitoring in place.

When it comes to managing services effectively, terms like SLA, SLO, and SLI are often thrown around like confetti at a parade. They’re in meetings, in documents, and even in casual office conversations. But if you’re new to the field or simply haven’t had the chance to dig into these acronyms, they can feel like a bewildering alphabet soup. And they can’t be missing on an uptime monitoring blog such as ours! So, what do these terms really mean?

Icinga 2.14 introduced a new feature that allows to better model complex dependencies between your hosts and services: redundancy groups. Let’s take an e-mail server as an example. In order to deliver outgoing messages, it has to look up the addresses of the destination servers and relies on DNS for doing so. For incoming messages, it has to know which accounts exist and in a corporate environment, this typically means looking up user accounts in a directory service like LDAP.

AWS’s serverless technologies are popular because they provide cost effective scaling and great separation of concerns. However, observing serverless architectures like Lambda is challenging due to their transient nature and abstracted infrastructure. Unlike traditional systems with consistent hosts, serverless functions are ephemeral, often scaling rapidly and operating in isolation.

Let’s embark on a new journey as we begin a series of blog posts dedicated to the migration of BizTalk Server to Azure Integration Services. I’d like to highlight that when I mention the migration to Azure Integration Services (AIS), I’m making a clear distinction from Logic Apps. This differentiation is important because, contrary to what some consultants and salespeople may suggest, migrating BizTalk Server entirely to Logic Apps is not a viable path!

Are you looking for an OpenTelemetry alternative? Then you've come to the right place. There are no good alternatives to OpenTelemetry if your use case involves generating different types of telemetry signals like logs, metrics, and traces and their collection. In certain use cases, like monitoring only metrics or time-series data, you can use a tool like Prometheus. If you’re sure you want an OpenTelemetry alternative, then let me point you to these three here.