Performing day-to-day IT tasks can be demanding—not because all tasks are challenging to carryout, but because of the repetitive nature of many tasks. A high number of mundane, repetitive tasks impacts productivity. Over time, these repetitive, no-brainer tasks can even eat away so much valuable time that it effectively halts your organization’s growth.

No matter where you live, if your business targets a global audience, the question of where to host your website comes up pretty often.

The software industry has been leading the automation trend by setting up tools, frameworks, and platforms to simplify and automate application development and deployment workflows. This enables less human involvement, less error-prone situations, and more consistency and reliability in rolling out software.

You’re called in. The system is misbehaving. It could be a key metric going crazy, or exceptions starting to fire. You’re troubleshooting, beating around the bush, just to realize that one of the team’s deployments was the one messing things up. Sounds familiar? If you’re practicing continuous deployment, you probably experience that several times a week, if not more. Users report that 50% of their outages are due to infrastructure and code changes, namely deployments.

Since the revolutionization of the concept by Docker in 2013, containers have become a mainstay in application development. Their speed and resource efficiency make them ideal for a DevOps environment as they allow developers to run software faster and more reliably, no matter where it is deployed. With containerization, it’s possible to move and scale several applications across clouds and data centers. However, this scalability can eventually become an operational challenge.

[Three hundred and eighty-one]. The number of days it’s been since our Sentry offices shut down, in what we believed at that time to be a very short-term temporary measure while we took stock of the events unfolding around us.

Grafana is free and powerful - a mainstay in DevOps and IT dashboarding. It’s an open-source visualization platform that lets you visualize data in real-time from almost any database. SquaredUp Dashboard Server is, at first glance, quite similar! You can dashboard just about any data to get real-time visualizations. All for free. So… The answer is… Yes, if you want enterprise scale dashboards hosted on Windows Server that are super-fast to set up (and usable by anyone).

Calling or texting with a mobile phone may seem like a simple process, but behind the scenes, network providers are engaged in a constant exchange of transactions to pay each other for connecting their customers. If telecom companies don’t stay on top of the data and billing, they could be surprised with their own big bills at the end of each month. Cosmote, the largest mobile network in Greece, handles the challenge by using Grafana Enterprise.

Plenty of tools make it easy for you to discover existing APIs and create new APIs that integrate essential parts of your IT infrastructure. However, using an API to connect two or more assets doesn’t ensure that you get excellent performance.

Prometheus is a free and open-source software for real-time systems and event monitoring and alerting. Originally developed at SoundCloud, Prometheus became a project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2016, alongside other popular frameworks such as Kubernetes. To start using Prometheus, you’ll need a solid understanding of all of the tool’s functionality.