You can evaluate the effectiveness of an advertising campaign as a whole. But in order to optimize it on an ongoing basis and get the most out of its budget, you need detailed data on the effectiveness of individual channels, creations, and locations. This is what UTM tags (or UTM codes) are for – parameters added to the landing page URL that don’t affect its display but allow the analytical package (e.g. Google Analytics) to record additional information about traffic sources.

So your organization has decided to move to the cloud. Smart move! Many companies today are either making the move to the cloud or have already made it. According to RightScale’s 2019 State of the Cloud Survey, 94% of IT professionals say their companies use the cloud. Over 90% is public cloud. Gartner predicts that public cloud revenue will increase by 17% in 2020. The biggest percentage increase is expected with IaaS. So, you’re clearly not alone.

Let’s start with a simple picture and a question. You are involved in the day-to-day running of a complex and hybrid cloud of IT systems and applications. These systems, technologies, applications, processes and other platforms perform a number of critical business functions.

It’s been another brutal week. The coronavirus a.k.a. “Rona” as my teenage daughter and her friends call it, is just making things miserable for everyone. There have been significant impacts on the tech sector, along with oil and gas, finance, travel, hospitality, and many other industries. But there’s always a silver lining when disaster strikes. So let’s start on a positive note: many of us in information worker roles can work from home.

Automation is a powerful tool that can make processes more efficient and less expensive. You may think that automation tools are only accessible by large companies with significant resources. There are some cases when outsourcing complex tasks to professional consultants is the best options, such as website migration by cms2cms.com. However, other tasks can easily and effectively be achieved in-house with the help of automated tools.

So you’re using InfluxDB and Telegraf. Perhaps you’re writing over a million metrics points per second. Perhaps you’ve used Flux to do some data exploration. However, you now find yourself in a little bit of a pickle. You need to process and analyze this large amount of data, and you’d prefer to do that work in your favorite language with your go-to libraries.

Five worthy reads is a regular column on five noteworthy items we’ve discovered while researching trending and timeless topics. This week, we explore the concept of alternative data.

Are you on DEV? Did you know that it's open-source, and that it uses Honeybadger? We just launched a new feature to help communities like DEV fix more errors together! Software development is more fun with friends; that's why we've built tons of collaboration features into Honeybadger over the years, making it easier for teams to fix errors. Recently the team at DEV emailed us with a feature request: could we make it easier to involve the broader DEV open source community in the error-fixing process?