In my last post, I talked about microservices and how their deep connection can offer a quality application. Now, I want to move up a layer. Not only between microservices, but…
Applications Aren’t an Island
Adopting a Distributed Tracing Architecture
In a distributed tracing architecture, we need to define the microservices that work inside it. We also need to distinguish the “component” behavior from the “user” behavior and experience—similar words,…
Defining an SLO – Understanding Business Needs
Building a monitoring and alerting system should always be driven by your business needs. This is an ongoing debate between the IT organization–which tends to focus on granular measures–and the…
Growing Beyond Your First Storage System
At some point, your first storage system will be “full.” I’m writing it as “full” because the system might not actually be 100% occupied with data at that exact point…
Nuances of Change Management Across Hybrid IT Environments
Enterprise networks and IT environments can be a very unique type of organization to work with. No matter what division is involved, change management can be a stressful thing for…
After It Broke: Executing Good Postmortems
No matter how much automation, redundancy, and protection you build into your systems, thing are always going to break. It might be a change breaking an API to another system.…
When is a Storage System Full?
When designing the underlying storage infrastructure for a set of applications, several metrics are important. First, there’s capacity. How much storage do you need? This is a metric that’s well…
Choosing What to Monitor – Understanding Key Metrics
Monitoring has always been a loosely defined and somewhat controversial term in IT organizations. IT professionals have very strong opinions about the tools they use, because monitoring performance metrics and…
Customizing Logwatch for Sysadmin Needs
Logwatch is essentially a system log analyzer and reporter. It elaborates logs that are simply collected by syslog. This kind of evolution is simplifying the daily job of modern system…
Log Analysis Tools Review: Syslog, Filtering the Most Relevant Events
Who’s passed more than a weekend going almost blind because something in your didn’t work as it should, and it produced, hopefully, thousands of lines of error messages, almost all…