Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

January 20, 15:01 UTC. I was sitting in my home office, watching the screen and feeling a mix of emotion and nostalgia as a pod was getting terminated. We have thousands of pods, continuously starting and terminating, and I’m definitely not spending my days watching them, so why was this one special? The terminating ingester-0 pod was the very last Cortex ingester running on chunks storage in Grafana Labs’ infrastructure.

What are the most important database performance metrics, and how do you monitor them? This is a question many IT professionals would like the answer to. We can collect and use a wide range of database metrics to analyze database and server resource consumption, not to mention overall usage. You are probably wondering why this is essential for business, so let’s explore this next.

As with any service in the cloud – particularly Microsoft 365 – it’s difficult to determine where along the path from user to Microsoft service lies the source of a service delivery problem. Without visibility into the entire spectrum of possible root causes – from endpoint to Microsoft cloud service – it’s nearly impossible to respond and potentially remediate the issue.

A cloud-first strategy can feel like a big jump from traditional setups. One of the benefits of a hybrid or on-premises strategy is you feel like you’re in control. You and your team know where your critical servers live. You can touch them. Your team understands your security processes, and you can easily verify security personnel follow them. Those are all significant benefits. However, a growing number of software teams are choosing to move to cloud-first strategies.

If you’re already using or planning to use AWS Lambda to run code without provisioning or managing servers, you’ll want to monitor your serverless applications with the new SolarWinds® AppOptics™ Lambda forwarder and APM agents. If you’re not using AWS Lambda, here’s what you need to know—it’s an event-driven, serverless computing platform by Amazon Web Services.

We asked in a recent poll which popular TV show your IT team resembles the most. Big Brother came out on top, with almost 40% of respondents saying that their incident resolution process most resembled this show. Would you compare your incident management process to an episode of Big Brother? If so, it's likely that your IT environment is highly monitored, but incidents still seem to slip through the cracks.

WebPageTest tries to use real browsers and devices for testing whenever possible, but doing that at scale has some serious challenges, particularly when it comes to testing mobile browsers. There are a lot of different moving pieces, from the device itself to everything that needs to be in place for traffic shaping. The phones themselves pose significant reliability challenges.