Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This is the second in a three-post series themed around Ops-led DevOps, where I explore the relationship between observability and a set of software delivery lifecycle practices that support the adoption of DevOps principles and the transition from project to product centric ways of working. I started with Site Reliability Engineering, here I consider Value Stream Management (VSM) and I will finish with Continuous Delivery. Defining VSM Forrester defines VSM as.

Epsilon, an OpsRamp customer and leader in outcome-based marketing, delivers marketing technology, solutions and services to name-brand clients such as Coach, Walgreens, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Dell/EMC. Acquired in 2019 by Publicis Groupe, Epsilon was recently ranked as a leader in its sector by Forrester. Success though, is a game with no end, and the company has been modernizing its legacy IT infrastructure in the last several years to remain competitive.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual happened online, August 18-20. It was the first virtual KubeCon, due to the coronavirus pandemic. I was happy to attend, although this was the second straight virtual conference I’ve participated in that ran on Amsterdam time. I did make it up for the 4 AM Pacific time start, though, and I was ready to go. As I got settled in, in front of my laptop, I knew I would be missing the hallway track a lot.

A key factor in good package management is organization. How you organize and structure your repositories will help you to unlock the efficiencies and promises of modern DevOps processes. There are, of course, a multitude of ways you can organize packages. You can group by version numbers, formats, architectures, filetype and more.

Website hosting is growing in popularity with businesses of all sizes. Instead of having to maintain your in-house web server, you pay a monthly subscription to someone else to host the website for you on their server. There are several benefits of web hosting for your business when using a hosting provider.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses have faced uncertainty regarding the future. While some companies had to close down temporarily, others were able to move toward a remote workforce. By mid-April of 2020, the number of employed adults saying they began working remotely peaked at 62%. While this number will inevitably go down once the pandemic passes, it certainly seems like remote work has become more commonplace.

InfluxDB provides several graph type visualizations to allow users to easily monitor their data. However, most of those graph types are only helpful if your data can be represented numerically. What if you want to track the health of your application, or visualize the status of your pods deployed in Kubernetes, over time? In both these cases, status is tracked over time using one of several discrete values, and can’t be plotted on an x/y chart.

Compliance has often been a checkbox exercise, primarily seen as a defensive strategy in preventing financial penalties and PR embarrassments. However, some organizations have taken a different approach. They’ve used compliance on the offensive - to give a competitive edge, turning “compliance teams” into “innovation teams”. These companies have improved processes and increased customer experience. They’ve installed an elevator instead of fixing the ladder.

With the evolution of technology in recent times, the face of communication is ever-changing. In today’s environment, failing to adapt to these changes would mean failing to understand what the customer needs. Since every organization is migrating to smartphones and tablets, and employees are starting to depend more on these mobile devices, we at the NetFlow Analyzer team decided to up our game in terms of our mobile offering.

Unfortunately, in this time of increased dependency on Microsoft Teams, Zoom and other remote conferencing solutions while working from home, Microsoft 365 had a Teams Audio/Video Conferencing outage between August 19th and 20th of this year. Fortunately, for Exoprise customers, they were able to detect the outage, learned of it many hours before Microsoft reported the outage and were able to stay informed as to when it was fixed.