Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

ChatOps has become an integral part of software development and IT operations, as teams rely on automated notifications to take the place of manual alerts. In the past, if there was an alert, someone would need to manually find that notification. Then, they would have contact team members to notify them one by one so they could start working on a resolution. In this complex network of communications, it was easy to lose information, duplicate work, and simply waste time coordinating the team.

If you’re like me, you started your week by reading the Microsoft blog about Nobelium, an advanced-persistent-threat (APT) group that was actively targeting cloud service providers (CSPs) and managed services provider (MSPs) in a recent wave of supply chain attacks. Personally, I wasn’t terribly surprised. We all know by now that MSPs have a bullseye on them for adversaries wishing to target the supply chain. What’s different about this attack is the motive.

Retrospectives are a well-established resource in the software and systems engineering toolbox. From sprint retros through to post-incident reviews, we look back on our work to learn from it and to get better. We can apply the same ideas to our professional practice with a personal retrospective: writing an analysis of our experiences to learn as much as possible. We could look over a whole year of work, or focus more closely on a particular project.

Synthetic monitoring is automated testing of critical business transactions and user experiences. Synthetic monitoring helps businesses find, fix and prevent availability issues, performance issues and 3rd party vendors from giving you an insight into performance improvements that you can make to your website and supply chain to improve conversions and user happiness. Synthetic monitoring is also sometimes called user journey monitoring.