Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

A leading provider of innovative digital and cloud services, part of the Microsoft ecosystem, chose VirtualMetric to get critical insights and complete visibility over their cloud environment. With 38,000 professionals in 24 countries, the company is specialized in cloud and application services, managed services, analytics, AI and helps companies to implement the latest technologies to various industries, leveraging the Microsoft platform.

I recently had a wonderful opportunity to contribute to the Computer Weekly Developer Network (CWDN) ultimate series on “Infrastructure as Code” that collected articles and overviews from vendors and experts operating in the IaC space to form a formidable reference on all aspects of IaC. My contributions were to offer some insight into our architecture that has been designed to monitor infrastructure that has been deployed as code automatically and without tedious manual configuration.

When IT operators and architects begin their journey with Google Cloud, Day 0 observability needs tend to focus on infrastructure and aim to address questions about resource needs, a plan for scaling, and similar considerations. During this phase, developers and DevOps engineers also make a plan for how to get deep observability into the performance of third-party and open-source applications running on their Compute Engine VMs.

I don’t care about religious wars over “which logger is the best”. They all have their issues. Having said that, the worst logger is probably the one built “in-house”… So yes, they suck, but re-inventing the wheel is probably far worse. Let’s discuss making these loggers suck less with proper usage guidelines that range from the obvious to subtle. Hopefully, you can use this post as the basis of your company’s standard for logging best practices.

Modern applications must deliver not only value but also round-the-clock availability, quick replies, and real-time problem-solving in today's digital economy. Since all businesses rely on software applications, their performance is one of their primary worries and frustrations, especially if their applications are the business itself. This is where Application Performance Monitoring Tool enters the scene.

Observability has become a critical part of many companies and their business. So did requirements for the systems which collect and store business-critical metrics. Monitoring systems need to be reliable, scalable, fast, and preferably cost-effective. Such features of any monitoring system never come for free or out of the box – you need people, a team of professionals who can build and manage it.

Source-side queueing is a fancy way of saying: You can configure Cribl products to make sure data isn’t lost in the event of downstream backpressure, again. Those familiar with Cribl Stream might be aware of destination queuing or persistent queuing, wherein Stream can write data to the local disk in the event of an issue reaching the destination. Maybe your SIEM is suffering from disk I/O latency. Maybe there is a DNS problem with your load balancer (Hint: It’s always DNS).