Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Kafka is a distributed, highly available event streaming platform which can be run on bare metal, virtualized, containerized, or as a managed service. At its heart, Kafka is a publish/subscribe (or pub/sub) system, which provides a "broker" to dole out events. Publishers post events to topics, and consumers subscribe to topics. When a new event is sent to a topic, consumers that subscribe to the topic will receive a new event notification.

IT Operations teams are often the bedrock of the digital business, ensuring that processes and services continue humming smoothly as developers continue to evolve and increase customer value. But increasingly complex systems can flood them with alerts that get in the way of operators from doing their best work and paving the way for new, innovative services.

The importance of network documentation becomes very clear when you have to sit down and troubleshoot a network from top to bottom. Or when there’s a changing of the guard at your company. New management wants to see what you’re doing with your network. Or new IT staff need to be brought up to speed quickly.

Last week we released Telegraf 1.18 with a range of new plugins including Elastic Beats, directory monitoring, NFS, XML parsing and some aggregators and processors to help with your data ingestion. All of these packages were written in Go 1.16.2. This was one of our largest releases in a while and couldn’t have been done without the 70+ Telegraf community members who contributed to writing plugins, fixing bugs, reviewing code, and everything else to improve Telegraf!

From 1st May 2021, Google will start judging your website based on a new set of performance metrics called Core Web Vitals. This initiative is focused around user experience and will become part of Google’s ranking algorithm. Failing them is bad, getting them right is a huge opportunity. Only 23% of businesses currently pass these tests consistently, so organic SEO will be negatively impacted for the large majority of companies.

What if I told you that monitoring network traffic is a lot less daunting than it actually seems? I think I have your attention. As a network has various moving parts, understanding it all can be a serious challenge. If something breaks or a component stops working correctly, implementing a quick troubleshooting process is essential. If you can't fix the issue right away, this could be detrimental for your end users, leading to more severe complications.