Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I first started my career in IT support back in 2003 when VMs where something that was “coming” rather than mainstream, so I had the privilege of witnessing the birth of VMs first hand when my company made the switch from bare metal to VMware GSX running on top of Windows Server 2003.

In previous roles I have been both an Engineering Manager responsible for a team, and a Program Manager responsible for branching strategy and process around CICD pipelines. In both of those roles (but for very different reasons), my product's build quality has been critical to product success. The obvious "why" to this is no builds, no product, but the real why is much more nuanced.

A vital aspect of working in IT is that you need to effectively monitor a broad range of KPIs and metrics to ensure the smooth operation of your IT infrastructure. IT dashboards streamline this process as they are specialized dashboards designed to offer insights and track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to numerous aspects of IT operations and infrastructure.

This article explains how to show cron jobs for all users and the current user on a Linux system. It covers ways to list cron jobs as a root user, view system-wide cron jobs, and check user-specific cron tasks. The article also explains how to read cron job formats and gives examples of common cron job setups.

Denis Gontcharov is a data consultant who helps aluminum smelters break down data barriers. For the past five years, he has supported the aluminum industry with IT and data services as an independent consultant. Denis also works as a Developer Advocate at the United Manufacturing Hub. Jeremy Theocharis is co-founder and CTO at United Manufacturing Hub. He is an expert in industrial IoT with over seven years of experience leading large-scale IIoT projects in various industries.

Exploring Open Source Alternatives to Datadog? Datadog can have a steep learning curve and be costly, especially if you are monitoring numerous hosts or managing a large team.

Nginx, a common web server and reverse proxy, uses caching to improve performance. Over time, this cache can collect old or unneeded data. This buildup can cause slower response times, more disk usage, and possibly serve old content to users. Clearing the Nginx cache often is important to keep good server performance and provide current information.

This article examines Nginx location directives. It explains what location directives are, their syntax, and how they process requests for specific URIs. The article describes different types of location matches, including exact, prefix, and regular expression matches. It also discusses the priority order of these matches and gives practical examples of their use in various scenarios.

Service outages are inevitable and directly impact customers, potentially damaging your company’s reputation and customer loyalty. Considering that an hour of outage costs on average $300,000 according to Statista, it’s better to avoid additional expenses in connection to losing customers. This financial impact underscores the importance of having a reliable status page to keep your customers informed and mitigate the consequences of service interruptions.

Syslog, an abbreviation for system logging protocol, is a type of logging that allows a system administrator to monitor and manage logs from different parts of the system. It can be used to track events and errors, as well as provide information about system performance. Syslog can be used on Unix-like systems, Windows, and other operating systems.