To quote the timeless Ren and Stimpy jingle, “everyone needs a log.” It’s true — everyone does need a log, especially developers. Despite the fact that no developer looks forward to combing through logs, they’re incredibly useful when unexpected performance issues, like one we recently had with file uploads, need some investigation.

Etcd is an open-source distributed key-value store created by the CoreOS team, now managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It is pronounced “et-cee-dee”, making reference to distributing the Unix “/etc” directory, where most global configuration files live, across multiple machines. It serves as the backbone of many distributed systems, providing a reliable way for storing data across a cluster of servers.

Unfortunately, Microsoft and Office 365 suffered their second major outage of the year and this one was even bigger than the first. We say “unfortunately” because even though our business is to help monitor cloud and SaaS services and our business goes up when there are problems, we don’t wish an outage on any cloud provider. Operating a SaaS business at the scale of Microsoft Office 365 is a herculean task and that’s why they get paid the big bucks.

Uptime.com includes several advanced check options to provide the flexibility organizations need in creating a response plan to downtime. Maintenance and planned downtime for patches and updates don’t typically create severe downtime events. With escalations, teams have an automated alert system that contacts designated senior-level personnel with relevant technical data.