Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Grafana Faro and xk6-browser are both new tools within the Grafana Labs open source ecosystem, but the pairing is already showing a lot of potential in terms of frontend monitoring and performance testing. Faro, which was announced last November, includes a highly configurable SDK that instruments web apps to capture observability signals that can then be correlated with backend and infrastructure data.

What is Azure Kubernetes Service? Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is a fully managed open-source container orchestration service offered by Azure. Provisioning, scaling, and upgrading resources can be done without causing downtime with Azure Kubernetes Service. Container orchestration in Kubernetes enables deployed application components to be isolated in distinct containers that can scale independently. A cluster made up of these containers functions as a microservices-based software product.

SonarQube is a tool for static code analysis that integrates with your existing CI pipelines to run quality checks on your codebase as it changes. As you develop and release new code, constant monitoring of code quality is crucial to ensure compliance, stability, and security. SonarQube’s Clean-As-You-Code philosophy helps to avoid technical debt by running regular code checks and alerting you to any problems early on.

User experience is key to ensuring the success of your website. There are many metrics that help you gauge and improve it, but Core Web Vitals are probably the most important ones. They are a set of real-world, user-centered metrics that quantify key aspects of the user experience. By measuring dimensions of web usability such as load time, interactivity, and the stability of content as it loads, Core Web Vitals help you understand how your website is doing in terms of performance.

“If you are a managed service provider (MSP) in Switzerland, your customers are very likely Swiss customers, so they speak the local language, and they want their data to be in Switzerland, and they want your service provider to comply with all the Swiss regulations. And the same is true in 190 other countries, especially after last year,”

In December 2022, the latest version of HAProxy, 2.7.0, was released. This open-source software is both a proxy and a load balancer, and is immensely popular due to the sheer volume of features it provides to help reduce or even avoid downtime and manage web traffic. Website or application downtime is disastrous for businesses. You want to serve as many users as possible, but if you have nothing in place to manage traffic, then your web applications can quickly become overwhelmed and fail.

Flaky tests are a problem that are found in almost every codebase. By definition, a flaky test is a test that both succeeds and fails without any changes to the code. For example, a flaky test may pass when someone runs it locally, but then fails on continuous integration (CI). Another example is that a flaky test may pass on CI, but when someone pushes a commit that hasn’t touched anything related to the flaky test, the test then fails.

I’ve always been wary about vendor events. In my experience, many of them are mostly marketing pitches, with little or no content that is applicable to my use cases. Despite that, last year I decided to convince my manager to let me attend ObservabilityCON 2022 to see what I could learn from it. My hope was that I would be able to get practical knowledge that could be applied as soon as I got back to work. (Spoiler alert: I did!)

For the sake of security, performance and uptime, IT pros must find problems on the network immediately and fix them fast. Hmm. Sound like network detection and response (NDR)? It is.