If you’re new to the concept or just trying to keep up with the conversation, Gartner defines Observability as the evolution of monitoring into a process that offers insight into digital business applications, speeds innovation and enhances customer experience. Some folks think that Observability is a new buzzword, but in fact the term was coined in 1960 by Rudolf E. Kalman, a Hungarian-American engineer.
You’ve written code, you tested it and built it. Now, your release is ready to deploy into production. But: is your production environment ready for the release? That’s a question every IT professional and platform engineer should be asking before accepting a new release — whether the release is an update of an existing app or a totally new deployment. To that end, here’s a checklist to make sure that your production environment is ready to go.
Load balancers and content delivery networks (CDNs) are critical tools for delivering modern, cloud-native applications. They play essential roles in ensuring the smooth flow of data between applications and end-users. If you don’t have both a load balancer and a CDN in place, you’re probably in a poor position to guarantee the uptime of your application across a wide geographic area. That does not mean, however, that load balancers and CDNs do the same thing.
DevOps has never been more popular than it is today. Since first popularized nearly 15 years ago by Patrick Debois and Gene Kim, DevOps has become the standard approach for managing IT. In this blog post, we’ll look at key trends and data that paint a picture of today’s State of DevOps. You can learn more about the history and fundamentals of the topic in our article What is DevOps and why is it important?.
Kubernetes is an open source platform that, through a central API server, allows controllers to watch and adjust what’s going on. The server interacts with all the nodes to do basic tasks like start containers and pass along specific configuration items such as the URI to the persistent storage that the container requires. But Kubernetes can quickly get complicated. So, let’s look at Vanilla Kubernetes — the nickname for a a K8s setup that’s as basic and elementary as it gets.
Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) is an exciting technology that provides secure, high-performance kernel programmability directly from the operating system. It can expose a wide range of applications and kernel telemetry that is otherwise unavailable. But with operating systems frequently processing very large volumes of network data, even with an efficient framework and cheap eBPF program runs, costs can add up quickly.
The Machine Learning team at Splunk has been hard at work over the last several months preparing for a few exciting launches at.conf22, held just a few weeks ago. Splunk customers want to leverage machine learning (ML) in their environments, but many aren’t sure how to use it, or even how to get started.
Anomaly detection can be defined by data points or events that deviate away from its normal behavior. If you think of this in the context of time-series continuous datasets, the normal or expected value is going to be the baseline, and the limits around it represent the tolerance associated with the variance. If a new value deviates above or below these limits, then that data point can be considered anomalous.
Network performance monitoring (NPM) and application performance monitoring (APM) are both key pillars of an overall performance and reliability management strategy, especially when dealing with complex, distributed infrastructure across cloud-native environments. NPM and APM also complement each other, in the sense that NPM can serve as an additional source of truth and observability for application performance.
According to recent surveys and reports on the industry, Kubernetes and containers are more popular than ever. Containers and serverless functions are being mainstream and ubiquitous – with a more than 300% increase in container production usage in the past 5 years. This trend is especially true for large organizations, which are often using managed platforms and services.
