Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Welcome to 2021, a year we are all entering full of hope. None of us knows quite what 2021 holds in store with regards to the global pandemic, but no doubt it will be another year of huge change. That will mean continued pressure on IT organizations across all industries to adapt and deliver new services to the business and users, all while keeping costs as low as possible. As we start a new year, many of you reading this will be considering your monitoring strategy in 2021 and beyond.

As with many things in 2020, this year’s AWS re:Invent was quite different from any previous iterations. For starters, instead of a week of live talks, face-to-face sessions, and a room full of booths, this year the event was fully online and stretched out for three weeks. As sponsors of this year’s event, we were excited to participate and continue to make an impact on the AWS community.

NGINX is one of the most popular web servers. According to nginx.com, it powers more than 400 million websites. It is, however, probably even more commonly used as a reverse proxy. Since it acts as a go-between for your application and your users, it’s important to properly monitor NGINX metrics. Sometimes you may find yourself trying to understand some performance degradation of the application while an issue may come from NGINX itself.

In this article, we’ll be discussing everything you need to know about the basics of AWS Lambda error handling and some popular methods using StepFunctions and X-Ray. Regardless if you’re an AWS Lambda expert or if you’re a new Lambda user, there’s always something new to learn.

Fraud rates for Unemployment Insurance Benefits (UIB) and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) are out of control. In May 2020, Brian Krebs of Krebsonsecurity published two articles detailing fraud that was occurring in several different state’s UIB portals. These states had been warned by the US Secret Service to be on the lookout for this. Reading the articles, the common theme is that many states are missing rudimentary controls for combating fraud.

Implementing the best performance testing tools allows for an optimized end user experience and improved web performance. In order to execute accurate and effective performance testing, it is important for QA engineers to have access to the right set of tools. With the plethora of performance testing tools, it has become tedious to pick the right tool for your use case. Let’s explore our list of the best performance testing tools.

IT leaders and decision makers certainly feel the impact of the pandemic, but for these past few months they haven’t been able to form any coherent narrative on what they are experiencing. Until now. Teaming up Pulse, an independent technology research firm, we recently surveyed 142 enterprise technology executives to understand how they have been handling their Digital Employee Experience (DEX) since the pandemic, what problems still persist, and where their focus is for 2021.

Platform thinking is a term that has spread throughout the business and technology ecosystem. But what is platform thinking, and how can a platform strategy force multiply the observability capabilities of your team? Platform thinking is an evolution from the traditional pipeline model. In this model, we have the provider/producer at one end and the consumer at the other, with value traveling in one direction.

A large amount of data requires special tools. Apache Cassandra is one of those databases that can handle a large amount of data spread among many commodity servers, providing high availability and fault tolerance without a single point of failure. Developed under the umbrella of Apache Software Foundation, it ensures full visibility into the code base and being free of charge.

Lumen is a stripped down version of the powerful and now very popular Laravel PHP framework, focused on performance and serving stateless requests. I doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Laravel, but it also doesn’t need them when serving API requests. For example, sessions, cookies and views are not a part of Lumen. It’s not intended for serving websites so everything around that got ditched.