Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Just before Halloween 2021, Roblox engineers experienced a horror story: a service outage that also took down critical monitoring systems. It seemed like the issue was a hardware problem, but it wasn’t. Users were frustrated, and the clock was ticking. After three full days of downtime, service was finally restored on Halloween day. While the incident itself was an IT nightmare, Roblox’s detailed technical post-mortem several months later was an excellent way to bounce back.

The ongoing partnership between Papertrail and DigitalOcean led to the development of the Papertrail software as a service (SaaS) add-on in the DigitalOcean Marketplace. With the add-on, developers can add powerful, simple, and scalable Papertrail log management to their DigitalOcean infrastructure in seconds. In two earlier posts, we reviewed how the add-on helps teams simplify and centralize log management.

Side by side with the popularity of hyperscale public cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, many organizations maintain on-premises data centers. Organizations may keep them for mission-critical legacy systems with performance demands the cloud cannot meet, or simply be in transition and have not yet migrated their infrastructure to the cloud.

I find it amazing how much opportunity and flexibility cloud environments are creating for organizations of all sizes. I’m seeing more and more companies experimenting with open-source software (OSS) relational database systems, which years ago would’ve been too complicated for the customer to set up. With Azure, you can spin up OSS systems like MySQL or PostgreSQL quickly to determine if the engine fits their needs. If it does, you can continue development on it.

In the recent past, container-based deployment architectures have played a significant role in improving applications on multiple fronts, including: Containers are all-inclusive packages containing lightweight services which are easy to spawn and terminate. However, container-based deployments can comprise hundreds of individual services and their replicas spinning up and down at any moment.

Transformation is key to being at the forefront of the tech industry, and over the past two years, I’ve been excited to lead an outstanding team of developers and engineers as we’ve embarked on evolving our monitoring tools toward observability. With this in mind, we’re excited to announce two significant product releases today. The first is a completely new product offering and subscription service we call SolarWinds® Observability.